Copyright N° 



COFVRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Ct)e JHetJjoiusit ^ulptt 



The Religious Instinct of Man 



The Religious Instinct 
of Man 



By 

REV. FRANK M. BRISTOL, D. D. 

Of The Baltimore Conference 




CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND PYE 
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Tw» Copies Received 

FEB 3 1904 

l K _ Copyright Entry 

/ ^txaa* , %. *n — ^ V 
CLASS a XXc. No. 



3X*V3>3 



COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY 
JENNINGS AND PYE 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

I. The Religious Instinct of Man, - 7 

II. Christianity and the Anglo- 
Saxons, 31 

III. Christmas and the Greatness of 

Childhood, - 54 

IV. The Blessings of Solitude, - - 64 
V. The Ministry of Affliction, - 84 

VI. The Angels' Easter Greeting, - 102 

VII. The Knights of the Cross on 

Olivet, - - - - - - 120 

VIII. The Poets on Immortality, - 136 



5 



I. 



THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT OF MAN. 

"Ye men of Athens, in all things I perceive that ye 
are somewhat religious. 3 ' — Acts xvii, 22. (Mar- 
ginal reading.) 

Paul's appearance in Athens was one of the 
most significant events connected with the first ef- 
forts to evangelize the pagan world. This apostle 
of Christianity came to preach where the voice of 
Demosthenes had thrilled the listening multitudes; 
to hold up a moral standard where Aristotle had 
taught his ethics; to discourse on world-origin 
where Hesiod's Theogony was familiar ; to speak of 
immortality where Plato had "reasoned well/' and 
where Socrates had died a martyr to his glorious 
hope. 

As he walked the streets of the world's most 
classical and elegant city he was scholar enough, 
and man enough, to appreciate all that human cul- 
ture had done for the Greeks, and all that the 
Greeks had done for the world's intellectual develop- 

7 



8 The Religious Instinct of Man. 



ment. But what thought was uppermost in his mind 
on that ever-memorable day? What most pro- 
foundly impressed him? What stirred his blood 
with most exquisite thrill of emotion? Was it the 
art which made the city beautiful? Was it medi- 
tation on the glorious past, on the philosophy and 
song and eloquence and arms "that made the old 
time splendid ?" Xo. We are told that "his spirit 
was stirred in him as he beheld the city full of 
idols/' full of the symbols of religions. When he 
was invited to address the people and explain his 
new doctrine, he began his great discourse, not with 
the discourteous and boorish words, "Ye men of 
Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too super- 
stitious/' but with the gentlemanly and conciliatory 
statement, "Ye men of Athens, in all things I per- 
ceive that ye are somewhat religious. For as I 
passed along and observed the objects of your wor- 
ship I found also an altar with this inscription : To 
the unknown God." That altar was the best that 
human reason could construct. Upon it was in- 
scribed the condensed wisdom of thirty great and 
original philosophies, the deduction of ten centuries 
of thought and speculation, the result of the long 
and brilliant history of Greek intellectualism — "To 
the unknown God." 



The: Religious Instinct of Man. 9 



In that altar and in that inscription Paul found 
the evidences of the Athenians' religiousness. He 
considered them "somewhat religious," not because 
their city was full of idols, but because there, sur- 
rounded with thirty thousand idols, he found an 
altar which had no idolatrous significance; an altar 
which stood for a great people's age-long inquiry, 
for a nation's dream and aspiration, for their search 
after the true God. That altar had a religious mean- 
ing. It said : There is still some divineness smol- 
dering in this Greek humanity ; there are still aspir- 
ings, gropings, inarticulate but deathless question- 
ings for the Infinite. Under all the dust and ashes 
of their vain and obsolete philosophies and idolatries 
slumber still the inextinguishable embers of a 
divinely-enkindled religiousness which may yet send 
up and send forth a flame of fire and a flood of light. 

It was here that Paul the Hebrew, Paul the 
Christian, found common ground with the Atheni- 
ans : "Ye are somewhat religious." He does not 
say, "Ye are somewhat philosophical and rational," 
or "Ye are somewhat pious or holy, or righteous," 
but simply, "Ye are somewhat religious." You 
have religious aspirations; you are trying to solve 
the problem of destiny; you are questioning the 
awful mysteries; you admit that thirty thousand 



io The; Religious Instinct of Man. 

idols can not satisfy. This altar and this inscription 
tell the story; it is enough; we here stand on com- 
mon ground ; we belong to one universal God-seek- 
ing humanity. A truce to all our bigotries, all our 
pride of opinion; we are brothers in the search of 
truth. 

It has been said that man's differentiating 
characteristic in the animal kingdom consists of 
his being a talking animal, a reasoning animal, 
a tool-making animal, a fire-building animal, a 
clothes-wearing animal, a food-cooking animal, or 
a laughing animal; but Burke more philosophic- 
ally characterizes him as a "religious animal." We 
can not study the institutions of any people, how- 
ever high or low in what we call the scale of civil- 
ization, without finding among them something 
equivalent to the Athenians' altar to the unknown 
God. In their literature, among their forms and 
objects of worship, expressed by some song or 
prayer (or significant silences more expressive and 
pathetic than any wail or chant), somewhere, if we 
honestly search for it, we shall find with every peo- 
ple as Paul found with the Greeks an altar, or the 
equivalent of an altar, to the Unknown God, and the 
indisputable evidence that they are, even with all 
their idolatries or skepticisms, "somewhat religious." 



The Religious Instinct of Man. ii 



The same is true of every age in the history of peo- 
ples and races. In the canyons and on the plateaus 
of New Mexico, where, long before the Spanish 
conquerors arrived, and centuries before Anglo- 
Saxon history began, the Pueblo Indians worshiped ; 
in India, where in ages remote the most contem- 
plative people of our world-history thought on the 
problems of existence, where the first philosophies 
found a cradle and the first religions found a nur- 
sery ; in China, where social institutions were estab- 
lished before Romulus laid the foundations of Rome, 
and where arts and letters flourished before Homer 
sang his "Iliad' 3 to the Greeks ; in mysterious Egypt, 
whose science and learning were a proverb before 
Moses saw the splendor of the Pharaohs ; in Assyria, 
entombed for ages with the profoundest secrets of 
her greatness, hidden from human exploration, but 
now becoming the most fascinating study of archae- 
ology ; in classic Greece and Imperial Rome ; in 
Britain and Germany and Scandinavia of the bar- 
barous time; in every age, among every people, the 
broad-minded Paul might have found reasons for 
saying as he said to the Athenians, "I perceive that 
ye are somewhat religious. " 

Paul did not confound the Athenians' idolatry 
with their religion. It is quite significant that the 



12 The: Reugious Instinct of Man. 

leaders of the world's great faiths repudiate idolatry 
to-day. At the World's Parliament of Religions the 
representatives of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Par- 
seeism took pains to argue that what we call their 
idols are to them but symbols. It is a most encour- 
aging sign when a correct distinction is made be- 
tween symbolism and idolatry, and when the leaders 
of thought in idolatrous nations are trying to rescue 
their most ancient symbolism from the degradation 
of idolatry into which it has fallen. By this, these 
same leaders of thought in India, China, and Japan 
may prepare the way for the people's emancipation 
from those idolatries which are destructive of re- 
ligion. Christianity, through its missionaries and 
teachers, is pushing these old nations and peoples 
back to the first principles, back to those old aspira- 
tions which stirred the heart of primitive man and 
created the first forms and symbols of religion ; and 
in this way, among others, they are preparing them 
to see the one true God, and to accept the true spir- 
itual worship. 

Surrounding this altar to the Unknown God 
were thousands of idols showing the decline of re- 
ligion, and yet at the same time revealing the tend- 
ency of humanity to substitute the form for the 
power, the ceremony for the spirit. It is impossible 



The: Religious Instinct of Man. 13 

for man to invent a true spiritual religion, and it 
is difficult for man to keep a spiritual religion even 
after God has invented one for him. 

It is almost impossible for man to rise beyond 
the tyranny of the senses, to set his thought and af- 
fections on things above. We too willingly permit 
our ears and eyes to become our masters instead of 
our servants. The substantial more than the ideal, 
the physical more than the spiritual, the temporal 
more than the eternal, seem to attract us, engross 
us, fashion us, and command us. Here is doubtless 
the philosophy of the world's unspiritual idolatries 
— poor, unsatisfying substitutes for religion. This 
accounts for all human retrogressions — the despot- 
ism of the senses. 

"No man hath seen God at any time/' "God is 
a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship 
Him in spirit and in truth. " But man has insisted 
on making God visible to the physical eye, and he 
has invented forms for Him; but in these forms he 
has lost, not found, God. Whenever a people come 
to look at the things which are seen they begin to 
decline. The growth of a race is confined to the 
age of awe, mystery, inquiry; to the age in which 
it looks at the things which are not seen. This is 
the age of hope and ambition, of faith and endeavor. 



14 The: Religious Instinct of Man. 

Out of this looking at or toward the things not seen 
have come the songs, the philosophies, the laws, arts, 
and character of a race. These, after all, are but 
the aspirings of a people ; not what they have been, 
so much as what they endeavored to become. His- 
tory tells us what men have tried to do. You have 
not found the deepest philosophy of a people's civil- 
ization until you have learned, not what they have 
become, but, what they have tried to be, hoped to 
be, aspired to. Every important people of antiquity 
began to decline as soon as they had achieved a 
great physical or material triumph on which they 
set their affections and pride. From that hour they 
began to look into the past instead of into the fu- 
ture ; to look upon the seen rather than the unseen ; 
to be satisfied with the temporal, and no longer to 
be attracted and inspired by the eternal. "Is not this 
great Babylon which I have built?" Such a boast 
indicates the decline of power, the loss of aspiration. 
Egypt began to decline from the day she finished 
her Great Pyramid. There were no first-class poets 
in Athens seventy-five years after the Parthenon 
was built. When Rome became Marble, no Virgils. 
Ovids, or Horaces walked her streets. The Temple 
marks the climax of Hebrew glory. Looking at 
things which are seen is the end of development 



The Religious Instinct of Man. 15 



because the end of imagination and effort. There 
is something very significant in the death of lan- 
guages, such as the Greek, Latin, Hebrew. It is 
remarkable that the language of Homer and Plato, 
or the language of Virgil and Tully. or the language 
of David and Isaiah, should ever become a dead lan- 
guage. But when language becomes most nearly 
perfect, thought declines. Words take the place of 
ideas. The use of words, the tricks and elegancies 
of language, rhetoric, and art, are substituted for 
thought, reason, philosophy, and poetry. Finally, 
lacking the life of new ideas, new feelings, inquiries, 
and hopes, language itself dies. The very soul of 
language departs ; the breath of life, which is ever 
renewing itself in perpetual regeneration, goes out. 
The people cease to speak it. The language becomes 
the language of the past, the language of a life 
which has been mighty and wondrous, but no longer 
is. The spiritual death of language is the death 
of literature. To become satisfied with the language 
we speak, with the literature we read or produce, 
with the music we compose, with the art we create, 
is to lose the power of invention, the creative genius, 
the spirit of life and growth. Mystery is inevitably 
a property of the spiritual and the Divine, and can 
not be wholly and adequately symbolized. 



16 The Religious Instinct of Man. 

In a study of the world's great systems of faith 
we shall find there was in each of them originally 
a great thought, a mighty question pouring itself 
out toward the infinite, an effort to solve the awful 
and pathetic mystery of things. When we find our 
way through all the forms and symbolisms in which 
man has tried to give expression to his hopes and 
fears, his awe and faith, his sense of the supernat- 
ural, we find still there in the heart of universal 
man an altar to the Unknown God. "O that I knew 
where I might find Him !" is the eternal cry of the 
soul. It comes like a mighty voice sobbing up out 
of the breaking heart of the ancient time : "O that I 
knew where I might find Him !" All history echoes 
and re-echoes it. The tombs of buried greatness, 
the ruins of storied civilizations, the fragments of 
the mighty lore of the past, still remind us of this 
sigh of human intellect, this moan of the human 
heart: "O that I knew where I might find Him!" 
And when we study these tombs, these temples, these 
shrines and altars of peoples gone, we find clinging 
to them the fears and doubts, the faiths and hopes, 
the longings and aspirations which no human power 
has ever been able to allay or satisfy. Give man 
credit for his efforts to solve these awful mysteries. 



The: Religious Instinct otf Man. 17 



Admire the intellectuality that has even invented 
religions to help unburden the human heart ; rever- 
ence the noble souls that have tried to penetrate the 
darkness and let in the light ; yet how pitiful man's 
failure to find the Unknown God ! These awe- 
inspiring ruins by the Nile are but fragments of old 
Egypt's prayers. This crumbling Parthenon shrined 
the holiest religious conceptions of the Greeks. The 
beautiful dust of Nineveh and Babylon is pathetic 
still with the inquiry of haughty and powerful races. 
Mighty ashes, the ashes of nations magnificent in 
story, strew thick 

" The great world's altar-stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God," 

and it would seem that every nation at some time 

" Sprang to its feet, 
Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed." 

Prayed, but perished at last unsatisfied; perished 
without finding God; perished with its dying eyes 
turned toward the Unknown ; perished, leaving amid 
the ruins of its greatness an altar to the Unknown 
God, and a monument of reason's failure to find out 
God. Unwittingly the Greeks had raised a memo- 
rial of their own intellectual failure, a monument 
to the limitations of philosophy. As profound a 
2 



1 8 The Religious Instinct of Man. 

reasoner as ever gave his brain to mighty thoughts 
and honest philosophy was driven, in the very de- 
spair of reason, science, and philosophy, to put the 
Socratic argument which demands and proves the 
necessity for a supernatural manifestation and reve- 
lation of God to the world : "Can man by searching 
find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty 
unto perfection ?" All the old religions of the world 
answered, "No." All the speculations and philos- 
ophies of the learned ages answer, "No." Crumbled 
altars, deserted shrines, vanished cities, ruined em- 
pires answer, "No." The history of every ancient 
State, the records of every civilization, the literature 
of every language, the monuments of every race 
answer, "No." That altar of Athens "To the Un- 
known God" answers, "No." 

We do not claim that Deity as a logical deduc- 
tion had not been found. Perhaps every first-order 
intellect has found God a necessity in the philosophy 
of things. It has been claimed by great thinkers 
that the idea of God is intuitive, and, like the belief 
in immortality, it "cleaves to the human constitu- 
tion," as Emerson would say. It may be seriously 
doubted whether dogmatic, affirmative i\theism is 
possible in the experience of any normal mind. The 
Bible does not make a single argument to prove the 



The Religious Instinct of Man. 19 



existence of God. There is not a work on Physics 
that tries to prove the existence of light or of elec- 
tricity. If it is the mission of science simply to 
explain the nature and laws of light, so it is the 
mission of revelation to explain the nature and the 
laws of God, not to demonstrate His existence. 
If at noonday one were to say, "There is no 
light," it would be proof of a loss of sight, not of 
the extinction of the light. That cry, "No light," 
is sad evidence of personal defect; not of a lack in 
nature, but of a lack in the man. "The foolish one 
hath said in his heart, There is no God." Is not the 
fault with the heart? It may be there are honest 
skeptics in the world, men who speak honestly when 
they say they find no necessity for a God. So, too, 
is the blind man honest when he declares there is 
no light, and the deaf man is honest when he says 
there is no music. Again, the idea of God is repug- 
nant to certain minds, and because they desire Him 
not, they would deny Him, and have Him banished 
from our thought. But if there are individuals who 
do not desire God or believe in Him, so are there in- 
dividuals whose organs are so deranged that they 
have no desire for food, and will not receive it, or 
whose nervous system is so diseased that sweetest 
music gives them pain, or whose eyes are so affected 



20 The: Reugious Instinct of Man. 

that the light is torture to them. But will the gener- 
ality of men repudiate food, and school themselves 
to dislike music, and shut their eyes to the sweet 
light, because a few unhealthy, abnormally-consti- 
tuted individuals have no desire for them ? We are 
to be guided, not by the exceptions, but by the rule, 
and the rule is that the idea of God belongs to man's 
original mental furnishing. As a rule, fishes have 
eyes, but some fishes are without them except in 
very rudimentary form, as are found in the dark- 
ness of the Mammoth Cave. As a rule, men have 
the power of speech, but some men are mutes. As 
a rule, men believe there is a God. If now and then 
a skeptic appear, should he be able to convince the 
world that skepticism is the rational attitude of 
mind? Should all the fishes become blind, all men 
become mutes, all believers become skeptics? It 
can not be doubted that science and a study of 
Nature have confirmed man in his belief in the ex- 
istence of God, and to the intuitive idea is now allied 
the philosophical and scientific deduction of intelli- 
gent First Cause. 

But here we quickly find the limitations of hu- 
man reason and human philosophy. All that science 
can do is to fill us with awe and wonder, and leave 
us just where the mysteries left the ancient thinkers, 



The: Reugious Instinct of Man. 21 



but possibly still more deeply impressed than were 
they with the fact that, with all our speculations, 
investigations, experiments, wisdom, and learning, 
we have not comprehended the universe nor any 
single planet, star, sun, or minutest atom of it. 
How much less have we comprehended God ! Every 
advance in astronomical science ; every new world 
found ; every increase of telescopic power that en- 
ables us to peer still farther and farther out into the 
star-strewn illimitableness of space, shows us a 
vaster and still vaster universe, and therefore proves 
the existence of a more and more wonderful God. 
The subtle, mysterious forces playing about us, and 
which science is bridling and harnessing for mag- 
nificent utilities; life, life, the principle and the 
pow T er of life, manifesting itself in multiform vari- 
ety and beauty, — all, all come to the inquiring mind 
to enlarge its ideas of power, of creative, controll- 
ing, governing power. "Omnipotence" is but a 
word to the ear of the ignorant. "Omniscience' ' 
has no meaning to the mind that has no mighty 
grasp of things. These are but empty sounds to the 
soul that has never stretched its brow toward the 
stars, or baptized its imagination in the waves of 
heaven, or tried to comprehend the length and depth 
and breadth and height of this vast, unfathomed 



22 The Rsugious Instinct of Man. 



universe. How small and contemptible must be our 
idea of God when our idea of power is so narrow 
and superficial! Nature becomes a demonstration 
of God to the thoughtful and inquiring mind. There 
is an argument in the sweet whispers of the flowers, 
and an argument in the thunder of the storm ; there 
is an argument in the golden music of the harvest, 
and an argument in the shout of the ocean waves ; 
there is an argument in the sweep of the eagle's 
wing, and an argument in the flight of the seasons, 
year by year; there is an argument in every beam 
of light, and an argument in the stars and constel- 
lations of heaven : "God is, and we have come to 
speak of Him." And from the dizzy heights where 
first the genius of a Galileo or a Newton trod, the 
student's wondering eye may be greeted with scenes 
more splendid than ever fell upon the enraptured 
vision of Egypt's or Chaldea's sages ; and with a 
loftier inspiration than ever woke the harp of Israel, 
the student of astronomy may sing: "The heavens 
declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth 
His handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, night 
unto night showeth knowledge." In the ruder years 
of the olden time the poet with the fine listening 
ear of rapturous thought and fancy believed that 
"the morning stars sang together," and this high 



The Religious Instinct oe Man. 23 



strain of Job inspired another with the sweetly 
quaint conceit of "the music of the spheres/' and 
taught the myriad-minded Shakespeare that — 

" There 's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st 
But in his motion like an angel sings." 

What is the meaning of the music of the spheres ? 
What is the song of the stars? Addison takes up 
the theme, and tells us that the stars are 

" Forever singing as they shine, 
The hand that made us is divine." 

Well may Young have said : 

" The undevout astronomer is mad." 

There never was an undevout astronomer. No man 
ever looked through the telescope without becoming 
awed into a grander faith and a more spiritual de- 
votion. The Hebrew poet, without the aid of tele- 
scope, but his "eye in a fine frenzy rolling/' looking 
into the azure depths of the sky that bent in splen- 
dor over the Bethlehem hills, was so charmed, sc 
awed, so exalted as to cry, "When I consider thy 
heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the 
stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that 
thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that 
thou visitest him?" How much more seriously, 



24 The; Religious Instinct of Man. 

then, may the student of the stars to-day ask this 
question, and be led to ask, not only "What is 
man ?" but also, What is life ? What is spirit ? What 
is omnipotence? What is omniscience? What is 
God? 

But it will not be claimed that a mere logical 
conclusion, even a scientific demonstration which 
satisfies the intellect, will satisfy the religious nature 
of man. "As the hart panteth after the water 
brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My 
soul thirsteth for God, for the living God ;" not 
for an abstraction, not for a mere logical deduc- 
tion as a philosophical or scientific necessity, but for 
"the living God." "My heart and my flesh [life] 
crieth out for the living God." 

Here, then, is the need that argues for a revela- 
tion of God to man. And the Gospel coming to 
humanity assumes two great facts, — the existence 
of God, and the religious instinct of man which de- 
mands God. All men are "somewhat religious." 
All men need God ; the soul of man thirsts for God. 
In their vague notions of the supernatural, men 
have tried to incarnate the Divine in wood, stone, 
tree, beast, river, or sun. It may not be unreasonable 
to suppose that this very tendency of man's thought 
to embody Divinity, to give Him form and substan- 



The; Reugious Instinct of Man. 25 

tial manifestation, shows the need of a Divine incar- 
nation ; it may have been through the ages a proph- 
ecy and an expectation that God would some day 
manifest Himself, take on form, assume a mortal na- 
ture. Be that as it may, "God was manifest in the 
flesh." "The Word which was with God, and was 
God, was made flesh, and dwelt among us full of 
grace and truth/' From His lips came the words of 
light and revelation : "If ye had known me, ye should 
have known my Father also, and from henceforth 
ye know Him and have seen Him." These wonder- 
ful words touch the tenderest chord of the human 
soul, awaken the most pathetic and the most sublime 
longing of the world's heart. Philip cried, "Lord, 
show us the Father, and it sufflceth us;" "It will 
satisfy us." It was the old cry. Philip voiced the 
universal feeling of humanity. No man ever more 
truly spoke for all men, all nations, all ages. He 
was not a philosopher, but he spoke for the most 
thoughtful philosophers that had ever reasoned on 
the origin and destiny of things. He was not a 
poet, but he had been stirred by the sentiment which 
had ever been, and ever will be, the most inexhaust- 
ible fountain of poetic thought. He was not a re- 
ligionist, but he had unconsciously given expression 
to the desire which had created religions and made 



26 The Religious Instinct of Man. 



the ceremonies of worship possible. He was not 
a mystic, but he had caught the germinal idea from 
which all historic mysticisms had developed. He 
was not a visionary or a dreamer, but there sud- 
denly swept before his mind the thought which had 
made the dreams of prophets splendid and the vis- 
ions of the old-time seers sublime. Great, wonder- 
ful outburst of the heart's deepest, most honest, most 
universal, most eternal feeling ! — "Show us the 
Father, and we shall be satisfied." Then, then 
was it that the revelation came and the glorious 
truth flashed forth: "He that hath seen me hath 
seen the Father." God is no longer the unknown 
and the unknowable ; "clouds and darkness" are no 
longer around about Him. The mighty prayer of 
the human heart has been answered: ''Thou that 
dwellest between the cherubim, shine forth. " The 
light is come ; God hath visited his people. Behold 
your God ! When Paul stood among the Athenians 
he was the apostle of the true God. He came to 
them with this wondrous truth, with this great light, 
and in one of the most sublime moments of this 
world's history he cried to those who had raised an 
altar to the "Unknown God:'' "Whom therefore 
ye worship in ignorance, Him declare I unto you/' 
He declared Him as Creator, "God that made the 



The: Religious Instinct of Man. 



27 



world and all things therein." He declared Him as 
the Author of life and being : "He giveth to all life 
and breath and all things." He declared Him as 
spiritual and personal : "We ought not to think that 
the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone 
graven by art and man's device." He declared Him 
as knowable and approachable, and "that they should 
seek the Lord if haply they might feel after Him 
and find Him, though He be not far from every one 
of us ; for in Him we live and move and have our 
being." He declared Him as Father ; "for we are all 
His offspring." 

So to every nation, somewhat religious by na- 
ture, comes the evangel of the living, manifest 
God, who is in Christ, reconciling the world 
unto Himself. To every heart, somewhat religious 
by its very aspiration, hopes, fears, and inquiries, 
comes the Christ, saying: "I am the way, the truth, 
and the life ; no man cometh unto the Father but 
by me."' "If ye know me, ye know the Father, and 
from henceforth ye know Him and have seen Him." 
"If a man love me, my Father will love him, and we 
will come unto him and make our abode with him." 
God, who dwelt in the thick darkness ; God, un- 
known and unknowable to human eye or human 
reason ; God, afar off, inhabiting eternity, — is 



28 The: Reugious Instinct of Man. 

brought nigh in Him who is "the brightness of His 
glory, and the express image of His person." 

Here is the revelation of God in humanity. Jesus 
Christ as the Son of God, incarnating the Divine, is 
but our Elder Brother, the First of the sons of God. 
"To as many as received Him, to them gave He 
power to become the sons of God." May not all men, 
then, become the sons of God ? And if sons, in their 
own measure may they not incarnate the Divine? 
Did not Jesus Christ, the Son of God, become the 
Son of man, to make it possible for every son of man 
to become a son of God ? And did not that perfect 
Son of man incarnate the Divine to show that God 
perfectly reveals Himself in a perfect humanity ? It 
may not be too extravagant to hope that every man 
of faith is to become a God-man, a man "filled with 
all the fullness of God." Is it not the world's hope 
that, under the ministry of Divine grace, all the sons 
of God shall go on to that perfection ? 

When man realizes in experience that the king- 
dom of God is within him; not only that God, the 
Spirit, is with him, but in him, and the Divine has 
become in his own soul "a w T ell of water springing 
up unto everlasting life when God hath shined in 
his heart, not as a ray of light from without, but as 



The: Reugious Instinct of Man. 29 

the indwelling Sun of righteousness, filling and 
flooding his nature with the light of truth and love 
and life, — then is he a God-permeated being; then 
does he, according to his own spiritual capacity, in- 
carnate and reveal God. O man redeemed, believer 
in the risen, immortal, Divine Christ, thou art now 
the temple of the living God. Look for Him, behold 
Him, dwelling not in temples made with hands ; not 
in the clouds and darkness of mystery and silence; 
not upon the throne of the distant and unapproach- 
able heavens, — but dwelling in the heart and life of 
man ; dwelling in human love and faith ; dwelling in 
the world's most noble character; dwelling in hu- 
manity's eternal hope. 

The progressive revelation and manifestation of 
God to the world is predicated on the spiritual 
growth of man. This progress will continue "till 
we all come unto the perfect man, unto the measure 
of the stature of the fullness of Christ." It is not 
only the prayer of Paul, but it is the purpose of 
Jesus Christ, it is the end of the operation of the 
Holy Spirit, it is the mission of the Gospel to you, 
"That ye might be filled with all the fullness of 
God." The perfection of humanity, of which Christ 
is the promise and the ideal, will be the complete 



3° 



The Religious Instinct of Man. 



and perfect manifestation and revelation of God in 
man. Not to the unknown, but to the known God, 
to the Spirit-God, to the Everlasting Father, will 
there be an altar in every heart; and it will not be 
necessary for any man to say to his neighbor, "Know 
the Lord, for all shall know Him from the least 
even unto the greatest." 



II. 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE ANGLO-SAXONS 

"But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, 
an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should 
show forth the praises of Him who hath called 
you out of darkness into His marvelous light, 
which in time past were not a people, but are 
now the people of God." — I Peter ii, 9, 10. 

The Anglo-Saxon race, so called, may be re- 
garded as the most conspicuous example of a people 
who have been taken in the rough state of barbarism 
and fashioned to greatness and superiority by the 
influences of Christianity. When the Gospel came 
in contact with the Romans they were in their de- 
cline from a high state of pagan civilization, and 
the Romance nations generally were the offshoots 
of a once highly cultivated people ; they were not 
savages, nor were they even barbarians when Chris- 
tianity laid its molding, regenerating hand upon 
them. The Greeks to whom Paul preached the 

31 



32 The Religious Instinct of Man. 

Gospel were the degenerates of a once splendid and 
nobly intellectual people. When the missionaries 
went into Africa, they preached to worn-out peoples, 
to Ethiopians and Egyptians whose glory and great- 
ness belonged to the past with the Pyramids. In 
these modern times, also, the people of the storied 
East, the races of India and China in particular, 
are a people whose arts and letters and political 
histories antedate even the Roman and Grecian civ- 
ilizations; they are heathen, but not savage or even 
barbarian. Hence, it can not be said that Chris- 
tianity took any of these peoples in the rough, in 
their natural, undeveloped, uncivilized state to fash- 
ion them to its standards of greatness. Christianity 
at best can have only refashioned them. But that 
may be a more difficult work than originally to 
form a people. The potter who takes the unformed 
and plastic clay to mold to an ideal of his own has 
an easier task than he who would attempt to gather 
up the fragments of a broken vase and of them 
make a new vessel of graceful design. Degenerate 
peoples, effete civilizations, can not be transformed 
into the same beauty, strength, and greatness that 
a people may be formed into who are taken in their 
original, uncorrupted, wild vigor. Christianity 
found the Greeks, the Latins, the Egyptians, the 



Christianity and the Anglo-Saxons. 33 



Chinese, and the East Indians in a condition to 
which in each case a certain type of civilization had 
brought them, or in which it had left them; but it 
found the Anglo-Saxons in the original ethical and 
intellectual clay. Or, to change the figure, when 
the apostles and missionaries went to the former 
peoples with the Gospel they cast the seed of truth 
into exhausted soils, into hearts and minds which 
had been sown for centuries with all sorts of seed — 
ethical, political, philosophical, literary, and aesthetic. 
Harvest after harvest had been produced by that 
soil until it had become weak, superficial, and well- 
nigh sterile. But when the seed of Gospel truth 
fell into that Anglo-Saxon mind it found a deep, 
rich, original soil — -fertile, vigorous, and inexhaust- 
ible. Hence the student of the philosophy of his- 
tory will look upon our Anglo-Saxon civilization 
as the noblest result of Christianity's influence upon 
the development, manners, character, and destiny 
of a people. This is the finest fruit, the richest har- 
vest, that has sprung from the living and life-giving 
power of the Gospel. 

It is not for us to discuss, much less to settle, 
the moot question as to whether the Anglo-Saxons 
are or ever were properly named Anglo-Saxons. 
In deciding the nicer points of name and origin 
3 



34 The: Religious Instinct of Man. 



the student may call the people of whom we speak 
Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Normans, Saxon-Normans, 
or English. No one is confused or uncertain, how- 
ever, in determining the meaning of the expressions : 
Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Saxon history, Anglo-Saxon 
civilization. We are interested, moreover, not sim- 
ply in the remote and nebulous history of this 
people as we trace it back to Gothic barbarism, back 
to that nomadic wildness, prior to all letters, arts, 
and institutions, but we look upon it in its develop- 
ment in Civilization in all its rich, manifold, and 
multiplex efflorescence. We study it not only to 
find its deep ethnical roots, but rather to find its 
spreading branches and its most highly-developed 
fruit in ethical character, in mission and in world- 
influence. If the Saxons, in common with the Ger- 
mans, Dutch, Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians, 
sprang from the Gothic or Teutonic root, and if 
they mingled with the Britons, Angles, Kelts, and 
Normans, they were also destined to mingle with 
the Dutch, Germans, Swedes, and Scandinavians 
and also with the Romance peoples, and, finally, in 
this Americanism they w T ere to become the converg- 
ing center of all races. Whether humanity was 
originally of one blood or not, it seems inevitable 
that mankind is to become one blood. But nowhere 



Christianity and the Anglo-Saxons. 35 

is this so clearly manifest as in the United States, 
where all nationalities are contributing to this new 
American life and nationality. As we see it to-day, 
the ends of the earth are meeting, centralizing, not 
in Germany, not in Russia, not in India, not in 
China, not even in England, but in America. And 
the dominant characteristic of this people is not 
Romance, it is not Italian or Spanish or French; 
nor is it Keltic, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish; nor is 
it Greek or Russian ; but it is manifestly and pre- 
eminently Anglo-Saxon. With all the contributions 
which other races have made to this Americanism, 
we remain in our most characteristic mental and 
moral traits Anglo-Saxon. We may admit that the 
Anglo-Saxon is to-day a composite character, but 
with the old Gothic elements predominant. We 
speak a language which in its present flexibility and 
copiousness proves our indebtedness to the Greek, 
Latin, French, and Spanish peoples; but it is the 
Anglo-Saxon which absorbs all these ; conquers, sub- 
dues, and assimilates them, while it preserves its 
own spirit, character, and sovereignty. This is 
manifest more particularly in the speech of the 
people. If science makes use of Greek and Latin, 
if the learning of Law resorts to the Latin, and if 
the scholarship of theology borrows largely from 



36 



The Reugious Instinct of Man. 



the Greek, the people in their home life and in their 
dealings, industries, occupations, and religion draw 
from the original stream of English undefiled. The 
words that are in most common use are the words 
of Chaucer, Wyclif, Alfred the Great, and Ethel- 
bert — words found as pearls of imperishable 
strength and beauty twelve and fifteen hundred 
years up the stream of Anglo-Saxon thought and 
expression. What common and yet what enduring, 
meaningful words are these : Man, woman, child ; 
home, love, wedding ; birth, life, death ; world, sleep, 
food ; earth, plow, scythe ; horse, cow, dog, cat ; 
father, mother, brother, sister, wife, daughter, son, 
hearth-stone ; land, law, right, truth ; sword, war, 
hammer, work, shovel ; water, bread ; day, week, 
month, year; grass, wheat, tree; cradle, bed, grave, 
heaven, God, welcome, good-bye, farewell, God- 
speed ! These are all Anglo-Saxon words, and these 
words will remain in the vocabulary of this people 
forever. About these words and the ideas they 
stand for gather all the moral forces, all the domes- 
tic, economic, social, and religious problems, all the 
enterprises, aspirations, hopes, and affections of a 
people. Whatever foreign words may come as trib- 
utaries into this great English stream, the force, 
clearness, music of the Anglo-Saxon will remain; 



Christianity and the Axglo-Saxoxs. 37 



this great, moving, controlling genius of the lan- 
guage will not be diminished. This is the language 
of the future. Science shall utter its greatest truths 
in this language, already the most copious and flex- 
ible because the most richly derivatic, and at the 
same time the most virile in its original Anglo- 
Saxon genius. Literature will find its most ade- 
quate, comprehensive, and forceful vehicle in this 
language, which has already furnished expression 
to the vigor of Chaucer, the elegance of Spenser, 
the sublimity of Milton, the transcendent splendors 
of Shakespeare, and the most forceful, majestic, and 
impressive translation of the Bible in the world. 
The language of liberty, too, shall be the language 
of Alfred and Wyclif, Hampden and Cromwell, 
Chatham and Burke, Jefferson and Washington, 
Webster and Clay, Gladstone, Bright, and Lincoln. 
God prepared a language for the prophets in that 
warm, figurative, devout Hebrew. When it had 
done its work it ceased to be spoken by progressive 
humanity. God prepared a language for the ex- 
pression of culture, aestheticism, and philosophic 
speculation in that beautiful and musical Greek. 
When it had done its work it ceased to be a spoken 
language; progressive humanity outgrew it. God 
prepared a language for the mysticism, the occult 



38 



The: Religious Instinct of Man. 



science, and the religious aspirings of the Egyp- 
tians ; but when that language had served its lim- 
ited purpose it was buried beneath the sands of 
time. God prepared a language for a civilization 
of force, law, militarism, and empire in the flexible, 
copious, and subtle Latin ; but when human thought 
and aspiration had outgrown its limitations men 
ceased to speak it, and it was left on the dusty shelf 
of the study or confined to the curriculum of the 
academy. In looking for a language which shall 
express the thought of the twentieth century in all 
its richness, complexity, variety, and power; in its 
poetic feeling, its scientific knowledge, its moral 
conviction, its political freedom, its humanitarian 
benevolence, and its religious faith ; in looking for 
a language that shall embody and vibrate with the 
spirit of the age, and voice the faith, hope, ambition, 
freedom, brotherhood, spirituality, conscience, and 
prophetic genius of the world's most progressive 
century, what language is comparable with the 
Anglo-Saxon, the English language spoken by our 
people? Has not God prepared that language, and 
is He not still preparing it in all its vigor, fullness, 
majesty, and adaptability to be the language of the 
brotherhood of nations, the federation of the world, 
the Kingdom of Christ on earth? This title of 



Christianity and the; Angw-Saxons. 39 

"Anglo-Saxon" is no longer limited to Englishmen 
proper; it belongs to the Canadian, Nova Scotian, 
Australian, and American. The name "English" 
is local and national, while the name "Anglo-Saxon" 
is general. If, as Freeman contends, the name 
"English" once included the name "Anglo-Saxon," 
now the name "Anglo-Saxon" includes the name 
"English," as it includes the name "Canadian" or 
"Australian" or "American." Anglo-Saxons is the 
name now given to "the brotherhood of the speakers 
of the English tongue all over the world." 

In considering the characteristics and mission 
of the Anglo-Saxons, it is not necessary to recall 
the traditions of the prehistoric ages. We leave 
to poetry and romance the deeds of Arthur and the 
legends of the Round-table. The study of com- 
parative religions may dwell upon the rites of the 
old Britons, and the awe-inspiring ceremonies of the 
Druids. Of the rude, long-haired, skin-clad men 
of painted faces who after battle drank the blood 
of their enemies, scalped their opponents, made 
drinking vessels of the skulls of their most cour- 
ageous and redoubtable foes, we read with awe 
when we consider that from such men, from men 
like Odin, came the Saxons. When we learn that 
the progenitors of the English-speaking peoples of 



4-0 The Religious Instinct of Man. 

this age were warlike, ferocious, plunderers and 
marauders ; that they were cruel, fearless, wild, and 
drunken; that in their religious ceremonies human 
sacrifices were not infrequent, and their prisoners of 
war were often put to death by thousands to pro- 
pitiate their deities; and when we remember that 
such men, such barbarians and savages, held in their 
wild, throbbing veins the promise and potency of 
all this modern English-speaking life we are amazed 
at the power of the Religion which has lifted them 
out of their savagery, tamed them, educated them, 
refined and polished them, and made them masters 
of the learning of the world, masters of the com- 
merce of the world, masters of the conscience of 
the world, and masters of the political and moral 
destiny of the world. 

If there is any race on the earth to-day to which 
the Apostle Peter's language may be addressed, it 
must be the Anglo-Saxon race. "But ye are a 
chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy na- 
tion, a peculiar people ; that ye should show forth 
the praises of Him who hath called you out of 
darkness into His marvelous light, which in time 
past were not a people, but are now the people of 
God." 

The Anglo-Saxons were not a people in Peter's 



Christianity and the: Anglo-Saxons. 41 



day, but have since not only become a people, but 
they have become "the people of God" by the min- 
istry of the Christian religion, by the converting 
power of the Cross, by the regeneration of the Holy 
Spirit, and by the fashioning, uplifting, and guiding 
influences of Divine Providence. Of all the proofs 
of Christianity's power to civilize a people, with 
which the wildness of barbarism has been made to 
rejoice and blossom, the Anglo-Saxon is 

" The bright consummate flower." 

There are certain inborn and inbred character- 
istics of the Anglo-Saxons that enabled them to 
appreciate many of the most vital doctrines of Chris- 
tianity. With all their vices of cruelty, drunkenness, 
and warlike ferocity, they were a brave people, and 
a people of domestic fidelity. Home was to them a 
holy institution. They emphasized justice and 
truth. They honored woman. In their best mental 
condition they worshiped no idol ; Deity was to them 
a Spirit. Though He was awful and terrible, yet 
they called Him "God" — the Good. We have no 
better name for Deity to-day than that noble old 
Anglo-Saxon name, "God ;" it is second only to the 
name which Jesus gave to Him when He taught 
men to call Him "Our Father." When Christianity 



42 



The Religious Ixstixci of Man. 



came into England its very admission into Kent 
was secured by the Anglo-Saxon's honor for wo- 
man. Bertha, the queen of Ethelbert. requested that 
the Roman missionaries be permitted to preach the 
Gospel in Kent. Ethelbert with his English chiv- 
alry could not refuse his Bertha's request. So the 
missionary came and the Cross conquered. What 
did the Anglo-Saxon see in Christianity to attract 
him? He saw the truth of its doctrine of the spirit- 
uality of God : it was not an idolatry. He saw the 
glory of Christ's heroism,, His fearlessness in death, 
the sublimity of His triumph over the grave. He 
saw how Christ honored woman, and how the Gos- 
pel surrounded her with love and reverence. He 
saw how Christianity sanctified the home : made 
the hearthstone the holiest place on earth : hallowed 
the marriage relation, and exalted the family as an 
heavenly institution. He saw that the Gospel incul- 
cated justice, honesty, and chastity. He saw that 
life and immortality were brought to light in the 
Gospel. This was enough to convert him. Were 
there many mysteries in Christianity which he could 
not dispel? Were there commands and demands in 
it which seemed to him too exacting? Did he scowl 
his old Anglo-Saxon scowl when he read the Gospel 
of charity and love, of forgiveness and non-resist- 



Christianity and the Anglo-Saxons. 43 



ance? Did his ferocious, warlike spirit protest 
against loving his enemy and turning the other 
cheek, and resisting not evil? Did he read with a 
skeptical shrug of his broad shoulders and a proud 
toss of his flaxen head that "the sword shall be 
beaten into the plowshare?" Did he clear his throat 
with a thirsty guttural growl when he heard that no 
drunkard shall inherit the Kingdom of God? Well, 
he had faults enough, weaknesses and wickednesses 
enough for Christianity to condemn ; but in spite 
of its high standards of gentleness, forgiveness, tem- 
perance, chastity, self-denial, humility, and meek- 
ness, the Anglo-Saxon saw in it the power of God 
for his salvation. He accepted it. Christianity be- 
gan its work on this virile, original race some twelve 
or thirteen centuries ago. The evolution of Anglo- 
Saxon character, power, and influence under the 
training of Christianity has been one of the miracles 
of history. Looking at the faults of that people 
to-day, taking into account all their weaknesses, all 
their sins, must we not still marvel at what the 
Anglo-Saxon has become? Weigh him to-day in 
the balance against our ideal, against what he some 
day must become, or against Christ's standard of 
perfection, and he is found wanting; but contrast 
him with what he was when Christianity first laid 



44 The: Religious Instinct of Man. 

its transforming hand upon him, and behold ! what 
hath God wrought ! Weigh him in the balance 
against any type of ancient manhood, and how su- 
perior he is ! Weigh him in the balance against any 
non-Christian type of manhood in the world to-day 
— who is his equal? Weigh him in the balance 
against any other type of modern Christian man- 
hood — who is his superior? And yet Christianity 
found him a barbarian, if not a savage, and evoked 
from that very incarnation of barbarism the intel- 
lectual and moral powers that rule the world to-day. 
It has been claimed that the best qualities, the per- 
sistent elements of the Hebrews, the Greeks, the 
Egyptians, and the Romans, of all the representative 
ancient peoples, may be found in the modern Anglo- 
Saxon. Who has come nearer to Homer than Mil- 
ton ? Who has more nearly re-embodied the genius 
of Sophocles and yEschylus than Shakespeare? 
Who has more triumphantly superseded Aristotle 
than Bacon? Who has more successfully rivaled 
Cicero in eloquence than Chatham or Webster? 
Who has more splendidly eclipsed the giory of a 
Phocion, a Cincinnatus, or a Cato than Washing- 
ton? Who has more nearly measured up to the 
genius of a Themistocles, an Alexander, or a Caesar 
than Cromwell, Marlborough, Wellington, Nelson, or 



ft 

Christianity and the Anglo-Saxons. 45 



Grant? Who of all the original minds of antiquity 
were the equals in inventive genius of Franklin, 
Fulton, Stephenson, Morse, Howe, Whitney, and 
Edison ? Who of all the lawmakers of history were 
the equals of the signers of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and the framers of the Constitution of the 
United States ? 

The Greeks were the most subtle metaphysical 
thinkers of history; the Anglo-Saxons are the most 
practical thinkers of history. The Greeks were 
philosophical ; the Anglo-Saxons are scientific. The 
Greeks were speculative; the Anglo-Saxons are 
creative. Again, the Hebrews and Indian sages 
were dreamers ; the Anglo-Saxons are doers. Those 
dreamers dealt with ideals ; these doers deal with 
realities. The Romans thought on law ; the Anglo- 
Saxons think on liberty. The Romans planned for 
empire; the Anglo-Saxons plan for equality. The 
Romans legislated for the glory of the throne; the 
Anglo-Saxons legislate for the good of the people. 
Roman civilization rested on force ; Anglo-Saxon 
civilization is founded on right. 

What a glory has attended this evolution of 
Anglo-Saxon civilization ! Take that original hardi- 
hood, that physical strength, that rugged, brave, ad- 
venturous spirit, that love of justice, that honor for 



46 Thk Reugious Instinct of Man. 

woman, that domestic fidelity, that reverence for the 
hearthstone, that love of home, that aversion to idol- 
atry; take that welcoming attitude toward the Gos- 
pel and that eager acceptance of the Word of God ; 
then come on up the splendid and ever-brightening 
highway of Anglo-Saxon progress ! What stalwart 
souls ! what heroes ! what men of initiative and of 
action ! What events ! what epochs ! what history ! 
A panorama of greatness and glory spreads before 
the astonished eye of contemplation. St. Augustine 
is welcomed by Ethelbert to preach the Gospel in 
England. Alfred lays the foundation of the Eng- 
lish constitution on the principles of the Word of 
God. The Norman Conquest comes with its mod- 
ifying influence on the manners, arts, and letters of 
the English without disturbing the basic religious 
integrity of their constitution. The decisive battle 
of Hastings is fought. The Barons meet King John 
at Runnymede, and with the love of right and free- 
dom born of Christianity they secure the Magna 
Charta. Wyclif gives the people an English 
Bible. Caxton introduces printing. Cranmer, Rid- 
ley, and Latimer in martyr fires light up the con- 
science of all England. Letters revive; the book 
begins its mission. Bacon thinks and Shakespeare 
sings. The King James' Version of the Bible ap- 



Christianity and the Anglo-Saxons. 47 

pears. A revolution shakes the kingdom. Crom- 
well and Hampden and Milton come. Such battles 
for religious and political freedom are fought as 
Marston Moor, Naseby, Worcester, and Dunbar. 
The Pilgrims turn to the New World. The Puritan 
strides into history. New England is settled. The 
common school is founded. The Declaration of In- 
dependence is signed. The American Revolution 
is fought. Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and Wash- 
ington appear with their compatriots. This Repub- 
lic is founded. Napoleon is overthrown at Waterloo. 
Slavery is swept from British soil. Out of the 
Jovian brain of Invention come the steam engine, 
the locomotive, the telegraph, the steamship, the cot- 
ton gin, the reaper, the telephone, and the electric 
light. The great churches of Protestant Christian- 
ity rise and shine, their light having come and the 
glory of God having risen upon them. A thousand 
colleges like burning stars light up the darkness. 
The press is free. Speech is free. Conscience is 
free. The last slave is free. Cuba is free. America 
is free. The United States is a world-power. In- 
ternational arbitration is effected. The brotherhood 
of nations is proclaimed. The world hails the dawn- 
ing of universal peace. What men ! what events ! 
what history! Can any other race boast of such 



48 The Religious Instinct of Man. 

a glory as crowns the thousand years and more of 
Anglo-Saxon progress? 

Nay, let us not boast. It has taken Christianity 
thirteen centuries to make the Anglo-Saxons what 
they are. But admitting all their faults and sins, 
ask the question : "Could any other religion have 
made them what they are? Could their original 
religion, or the old Druidical superstitions have made 
them what they are? Could the religion of Odin 
have made them what they are? Could Buddhism 
have made them what they are? Could Confucian- 
ism or Mohammedanism have made them what they 
are? Could Atheism have made them what they 
are?" 

It seems to us that after a training of thirteen 
centuries the warlike spirit of the Anglo-Saxon 
should have been subdued; but he is to-day the 
greatest fighter on the land, and his battleships in 
triumph strut the seas. It seems to us that by this 
time the drunken Anglo-Saxon should have been 
sobered and emancipated from the tyranny and ap- 
petite of drink. It seems to us a shame that Anglo- 
Saxons should have taught the Chinese the use of 
opium. It seems remarkable that crime should still 
be possible in lands where the Gospel has been 
preached for more than a thousand years. But on 



Christianity and the Anglo-Saxons. 49 



second thought we know enough to know that 
Christianity is not responsible for the sins which it 
condemns. When the Anglo-Saxon sells rum and 
opium, when the Anglo-Saxon oppresses people, 
when the Anglo-Saxon keeps slaves, when the 
Anglo-Saxon commits crime, he does it in defiance 
of, not in obedience to, Christianity. It is not the 
Christianity of England or the Christianity of Amer- 
ica that supports and defends and legally protects 
traffic in sin ; it is the old, original unregenerate 
Anglo-Saxon that still thirsts for blood and would 
drink it from the skull of his victim. Moreover, 
Christianity works like leaven hidden in the meal ; 
it is the leaven of truth, the leaven of love, the 
leaven of brotherhood, the leaven of righteousness. 
It takes time for the universal mind to become thor- 
oughly leavened. The people are saved and trans- 
formed, man by man, mind by mind, conscience by 
conscience, will by will. This is a slow process. 
Until all men are saved, transformed, converted, 
and filled with the power of a new life, there will be 
sin and wrong in the world. In the ratio of men's 
regeneration will sin disappear. It is disappearing. 
The world is becoming regenerate. When Chris- 
tianity found them the Anglo-Saxons were notorious 
drunkards, robbers, gluttons, and murderers. To- 
4 



50 The: Religious Instinct of Man. 



day with all their faults they are the most highly 
intellectual and moral people of the world. Trace 
the moral development of this race. What a moral 
advance w r as the age of Elizabeth on the age of 
Alfred the Great ! What an advance was the age of 
William III on the age of Charles II ! What an 
advance was the age of Victoria on the age of the 
Georges ! Society is not becoming effete. The 
Anglo-Saxon is not losing his moral sense and poise. 
He has the future. He grows better and greater. 
Few civilizations of history, worthy to be called such, 
have lasted a thousand years. There is a self-pre- 
serving savor in this Anglo-Saxon salt. It is Chris- 
tian still, and was never more so. Every other 
civilized race has in time become degenerate. There 
is no sign of Anglo-Saxon degeneracy. In all the 
long history of this vigorous race there can not be 
found a single positive and long continued retro- 
grade movement. Anglo-Saxon morals and Anglo- 
Saxon character have been improving century by 
century. And no race of antiquity, not excepting 
the Jews, ever stood on so exalted a moral plain as 
that which has been reached and which is now held 
by the English-speaking peoples of the world. Never 
before was the standard of manly honor so high; 
never was woman so profoundly and universally 



Christianity and the: Anglo-Saxons. 51 



reverenced ; never was such care taken in the mental 
and moral training of children ; never was education 
so widely diffused ; never was there so little poverty 
and ignorance : never was there less intemperance, 
less superstition, less bigotry, less inhumanity ; 
never were the poor and unfortunate so mercifully 
and tenderly cared for ; never was labor so dignified, 
so well rewarded, and so prosperous ; never was 
government less tyrannical and despotic, so humane 
and democratic ; never was religion more practical, 
the Bible more authoritative, Christ more manifestly 
King of kings and Lord of lords. Anglo-Saxon 
civilization is Christian. 

The surest antidote for pessimism is a look back- 
ward. The social, political, economic, moral, and 
religious conditions of the past teach us w 7 hat a prog- 
ress has been made in a single century. Look back- 
ward to the religious indifference of the eighteenth 
century, to the days of almost universal infidelity 
among wits and men of letters ; look backward to 
the social conditions of a hundred years ago in any 
part of the English-speaking world, and what a con- 
trast appears to the higher-minded, more serious, 
philanthropic, universally enlightened, and Scrip- 
turally righteous social spirit and life of this twen- 
tieth century ! 



52 The; Reugious Instinct of Man. 

Look backward but fifty years in the history of 
this country, to the time when statesmen were 
gamblers, drunkards, slaveholders, and duelists, and 
the conviction grows that our commercial, industrial, 
literary, scientific, and political progress has been no 
more remarkable than our moral progress. 

To-day the English-speaking peoples are fore- 
most in the enjoyment of law-protected liberty. 
They are leading the world toward the universal 
Christian democracy. Anglo-Saxon Christianity is 
the only truly Catholic Christianity. This is the 
Christianity that stands for universal education, for 
an untrammeled science, for equality before the law, 
for the sovereignty of the people, for the brother- 
hood of man. The Anglo-Saxon is to-day more 
nearly akin to every race of the earth than any other 
man. More races have poured their blood into his 
veins than into any other. He has a mission, there- 
fore, to every people. All races are looking to him 
for light — political, scientific, and religious light. 
The Anglo-Saxons were the great missionaries of 
the nineteenth century. They will be the great mis- 
sionaries of this twentieth century. Has not God 
raised them up and made them a mighty people, 
that by them liberty may be proclaimed to all nations, 



Christianity and the Anglo-Saxons. 53 



the heathen races be evangelized with the Gospel 
of Jesus Christ, and the world be prepared for the 
New Heaven and the New Earth, wherein dwelleth 
righteousness? Is not this the high destiny of the 
Anglo-Saxon race, "which in time past were not a 
people, but are now the people of God ?" 



III. 

CHRISTMAS AND THE GREATNESS OF 
CHILDHOOD. 

"And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set 
him in the midst of them." — Matt, xviii, 2. 

Again, the little child is on the throne of the 
Christian world. The Christmas time places child- 
hood where the Lord placed it, — at the center of 
society. All hearts bow to the scepter of that mys- 
terious and beautiful power which commands with 
a caress and rules with tears and laughter. The boys 
and the girls own the universe to-day, and run it. 
But that means, only, that simplicity, sincerity, faith, 
hope, love, imagination, anticipation, and prophecy 
are at the heart of the world, once more insisting 
upon making this world good and happy by preserv- 
ing its eternal youth. It was when the disciples 
were talking about greatness, about the ability to 
stand at the center and focus the attention of the 
world, to sit on the throne of power and influence 
and rule the Kingdom and win the honors, that Jesus 
set a little child in their midst, to rebuke their igno- 

54 



Christmas and Childhood. 



55 



ranee and humble their presumption. Here is the 
leader and commander. Here is the inspiration of 
histories. Here is the true dreamer, prophet, and 
seer. Here is the conqueror. What is the power of 
your Alexanders, Caesars, Napoleons, to the power 
of a little child? This child is the embodiment of 
the forces that govern society, that make and un- 
make governments, that shape the destinies of 
States. It is not greed, selfishness, pride of opinion, 
thirst for power, worldly ambition, that finally, and 
by Christ's authority, get to the front and to the 
center of the world, to become its greatness, its sov- 
ereignty. But it is simplicity, sincerity, faith, con- 
science, humility, hope, affection, purity, aspiration, 
and prophetic anticipation — the impulses, intuitions, 
virtues, and emotions of the child-heart. 

The most charming portrait that remains of 
Richard Owen, the great naturalist, represents him 
with his arm thrown about a little child, and his 
strong, full-browed head leaning against the curly 
head of the little girl. Many of the photographs 
of Mr. Gladstone were taken with a little child by 
his side or in his arms. There is not a more touch- 
ing and interesting picture of Napoleon than that 
familiar one which represents him seated on a sofa 
with a little child asleep on his lap. And the most 



56 



Ths Reugious Instinct of Man. 



beautiful pen-portrait of Jesus Christ, the Son of 
God, is that in which He takes the little children up 
in His arms, puts His hands upon them, and blesses 
them; or that in which He calls a little child unto 
Him, and sets him in the midst of His disciples, to 
teach them who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 

The Divine Teacher would lead the world back 
to that simplicity, reverence, and faith which are 
characteristic of the child-life. Feeling, sentiment, 
impulse, spontaneity, ingenuousness, — these are 
childish. Yes, but nothing is more manly or more 
womanly in the kingdom of heaven, in the highest, 
purest, and most perfect social organism. The best 
men and women can not forget that they were once 
boys and girls ; and some of their happiest dreams 
in after years are of those 

" Sweet childish days, that were as long 
As twenty days are now." 

There has come to many a soul in the hour of weari- 
ness, of unsuccessful endeavor, of disappointed hope, 
of baffled ambition, the thought so sadly expressed 
by Elizabeth Akers Allen in the familiar lines : 

" Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years ! 
I am so weary of toil and of tears, — 
Toil without recompense, tears all in vain ! 
Take them, and give me my childhood again !" 



Christmas and Childhood. 



57 



But why wish to go backward ? May we not, truly, 
carry the feelings of childhood with us through all 
the years of our earthly pilgrimage, if we make any 
real progress and succeed in bringing our lives to 
any satisfaction? The man who has left his child- 
hood in the past, and dismissed it from his life and 
nature, has lost the power of highest development 
whether intellectual or moral. He has lost the power 
of hope, imagination, prophecy, the power to dream, 
to anticipate, and to behold the unseen ; and, hence, he 
has lost the inspiration and power to aspire. He has 
been fascinated with the glittering eyes of the tem- 
poral, like a bird charmed by the serpent's gaze, 
only to be crushed in its jaws, and never to soar 
into the blue of the eternal. Do not lose your child- 
hood's heart. 

As we contemplate the bright face of this 
childhood, every great creative feeling seems to 
be playing in its eyes and quivering on its lips 
and shining from its white, smooth, and unscarred 
brow. The feelings or emotions that bring happi- 
ness are all there, embodied in that sweet girl, that 
lovely boy, to-day. They are looking like seers, 
through the dark nights, right into the glorious 
Christmas morning. Here is the most perfect and 
beautiful picture of the power of prophecy, the joy 



58 The Religious Instinct of Man. 



of anticipation, the sleepless supremacy and sover- 
eignty of hope, we can ever look upon. And here is 
found the best and sweetest philosophy of human 
happiness and of human power to develop the true 
greatness of life and character. We derive our 
sweetest pleasures from our anticipations. Realiza- 
tion itself is rarely satisfying. The present is too 
narrow to meet the demands of the intellectual and 
moral nature. Attainment means less than aspira- 
tion. We are never satisfied with the past. Mem- 
ory does not make us happy. But the future brings 
the recompense. That ministers to the imagination, 
and imagination makes up a large part of the world's 
thought-life. That, too, is the creative power of 
the mind; that gives us our poetry and music and 
art; nay, more, to the imagination we are indebted 
for our discoveries and inventions and the most 
practical benefits. We dream our sciences before we 
prove them. Our faiths and hopes reach into the 
future, and they are greater than all our reasonings ; 
they are more creative, more reliable, more inspira- 
tional than all our logic. These are the forces in 
men which move the world. And there is, after all, 
nothing more rational than humanity's faiths and 
hopes. Its reasonings have never been as rational 
as its intuitions, of which are born its hopes and 



Christmas and Childhood. 



59 



faiths. Humanity's impulses and emotions are, as 
a rule, saner than humanity's philosophies. What 
man believes and hopes amounts to more than what 
he knows. He knows, and can know, so little ! As 
a rule, what man believes and hopes is worth more 
to him than what he knows. When you drive man 
into the limits of his absolute knowledge, you pen 
him up in a very narrow life, a very small w r orld; 
you put your eagle in a cage instead of into the sky ; 
you put your ship in the dry dock instead of out 
upon the sea. Faith, hope, imagination, emotion, 
have sea-room and sky-room; they have the range 
and sweep of the universe. But a very little, infini- 
tesimal part of this world belongs to knowledge, to 
science. 

Childhood is credulous and imaginative, full of 
faith and full of hope. But the credulity of child- 
hood is more rational than the skepticism of man- 
hood, and the fancy of youth is more creative and 
inspirational than the logic of age. A human being 
will grow and a nation of people will develop while 
the imagination is fresh and active ; when that dies, 
Parthenons crumble, Homers and Sapphos, Dantes 
and Shakespeares, Raphaels and Lorraines vanish. 
A civilization lives as long as it has the power to be- 
lieve and imagine and hope. The true history of a 



6o The Reugious Instinct of Man. 



nation is the history of its aspiration. Can there 
be a living aspiration in the heart of a man or of a 
nation where faith, imagination, and anticipation lie 
dead? The heart of a civilization is the heart of a 
child, when that civilization is at its best. The spirit, 
therefore, of these ante-Christmas days is the spirit 
which brings the world to all its greatness ; it is the 
spirit of anticipation, of hope, of peering into the 
future with sparkling eyes and glowing cheeks ; the 
spirit of great dreaming, of imagination, of visions, 
of prophecy. 

This Christ-blessed childhood in our midst is 
thinking on the morrow, not on the yesterday ; and 
what are its thoughts of that morrow ? Altogether 
optimistic. The most rational and philosophical and 
Christian characteristics of this childhood thought 
and feeling is its splendid optimism. This little 
child is thinking by day and dreaming by night of 
what the Christmas day will bring, and what the 
Christmas day will carry. And this child, this epit- 
ome of true greatness, this epitome of all that is 
best in human nature, derives as much happiness 
from anticipating the happiness of others as from 
dreaming of its own coming joys and the gifts that 
will minister to those joys. These little, sly whisper- 
ings into mamma's ear when papa is reading, and 



Christmas and Childhood. 



61 



these little gigglings into papa's ear when mamma 
is busy sewing, are the sweetest, most poetical ex- 
pressions of the joy that comes to the heart that 
anticipates making others happy, that can be im- 
agined. I have seen boys and girls dance with glee to 
think how happy some one else is to be made by their 
Christmas gifts. O blessed, blessed be that child- 
hood heart which joys to think of others' joy, which 
bounds and dances with the thought, not only of 
what Christmas will bring to it from others, but also 
of what the Christmas will carry from it to others ! 
Your little girl will dream happier dreams, by day 
and night, of the joy some poor little girl will have 
on Christmas in the present your child will send her, 
than she can dream of the joy your own gifts will 
bring her on that blessed morning. That boy's eyes 
are growing big and lustrous with wonder and an- 
ticipation, but get at his deepest heart-thought, and 
you will find that what he intends to do for some 
other boy, perhaps some poor boy, is giving him 
greater happiness than what he hopes you will do 
for him when the sweet morning dawns. 

This lesson must get into our hearts, and it must 
remain there. This element of the everlasting life, 
this spirit of eternal youth, of immortal growth, of 
perennial hope, of joyful anticipation, is the spirit 



62 The: Religious Ixstixct of Man. 



of true greatness. Men are made strong and great 
by what they hope, believe, love, anticipate, imagine, 
and aspire to. On what you hope the morrow will 
bring to you, and on what you anticipate the morrow 
will carry to others from you, must depend your 
power for moral growth, for holy influence, for 
abiding happiness. What we hope to become, and 
what we hope to do, is the inspiration of our lives. 
The gifts which the future has to bestow upon us — 
gifts of God and of angels and of men, gifts of truth 
and love and light — are our encouragement to-day; 
and we, too, with childhood's believing, hoping 
heart, may look through many dark nights to some 
sure, great, luminous morning when the gifts will 
come. Limited as our powers may be to-day, we 
are looking forward to the time when we shall be 
able to bring greater gifts to God and men, when we 
shall have more of the spirit and power of the Christ- 
child and the Christ-man to confer blessings upon 
the world. Has not God bent His listening ear to 
our whisperings when in our most unselfish prayers 
we have asked for power to do more good, power 
to become greater in influence? What a picture of 
life in its unfolding possibilities, — Childhood, dream- 
ing of youth with all its strength and power ; Youth, 
dreaming of manhood with all its opportunity and 



Christmas and Childhood. 



63 



greatness; Manhood, dreaming of old age with all 
its honor and recompense of glory ; Old Age, dream- 
ing of heaven and of eternal youth ! We come into 
this world with the dream of life, we leave it with 
the dream of immortality. Existence shall be an 
eternal, blessed childhood ; an existence of faith and 
hope and love ; an existence of opening, unfolding 
life ; an existence with an everlasting future. Who 
is greatest in the kingdom of heaven ? He who has 
caught the spirit of eternal hope ; the spirit of eter- 
nal reverence, faith, and prophecy ; the spirit of im- 
mortal youth. Who is greatest in the kingdom of 
heaven ? 

"Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him 
in the midst of them." 



IV. 



THE BLESSINGS OF SOLITUDE. 

"He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he 
leadeth me beside the still zcaters; he restoreth 
my soul/' — Psa. xxiii, 2, 3. 

Solitude is one of the soul's most unfailing 
restoratives. Commendable in many respects as this 
strenuous American life may be. is it not possible 
for us to pay too much for our wealth and rapid 
progress ? Is there not danger of overtaxing those 
nervous energies which will be quite as necessary 
in holding as they have been in gaining the heights 
of prosperity? An army may dash into battle with 
an impetuosity which it will not be able to maintain, 
and thus even in the long struggle defeat itself. 
What profit to us will be all our social prestige, our 
commercial daring, our industrial supremacy, and 
our national world-power, when our vitality and 
nervous energy become exhausted and the brain-fag 
sets in ? 

64 



The Blessings otf Soutude. 65 



We may live too fast; we may strain our indi- 
vidual, social, and national powers to an excessive 
and fatal tension. 

In the spiritual life of man — yes, and in the men- 
tal life, the professional life, the business life — there 
is often need that we lie down in green pastures, 
walk beside the still waters, and there find the neces- 
sary soul restorative, David's secret of spiritual rest. 

That grand old poet understood the philosophy 
of getting the most out of life. Nor did he experi- 
ence the fatigue of such a strenuous life as ours. 
That poet, soldier, and king never forgot the free, 
wholesome, and restful shepherd-life of his boyhood, 
when he led the flocks of Jesse into green pastures 
and beside the still waters. Many a day he 
doubtless longed to quit the royal courts of Jeru- 
salem for the "green fields and babbling brooks'' of 
Bethlehem. The sweet and holy ministrations of 
solitude have yet to be learned and appreciated. 
The imagination and emotions, the judgment and 
reason, the faith-power and the will-power, find 
stimulus and nourishment in that quiet, retrospect- 
ive, introspective, and prospective aloneness which 
gives the soul a chance to become acquainted with 
itself. 

There is nothing more inimical to highest cul- 
5 



66 Ths Reugious Instinct of Man. 



ture and spirituality than perpetual "society." We 
have no argument to make against society. That is 
a necessary and inevitable institution. Our conten- 
tion is against the social restlessness, the demands 
which engross and enslave the life. We are not 
advocating the cloister, the stupidity and ennui of 
the hermitage, but simply an occasional, if not a fre- 
quent, soul-bath in the cleansing, invigorating si- 
lences and inactivities, a quiet walk beside the still 
waters of solitude. It is a blessing for the soul to 
pass into a quiet calm now and then, where no ripple 
is seen on the waters, where scarcely a zephyr is 
felt, or even the flutter of a sail. The poet experi- 
enced the nervous strain of life when he sang, and 
sang for you and me as for himself : 

" Calm soul of things ! O make it mine 
To feel, amid the city's jar, 
That there abides a peace of thine 
Man did not make, and can not mar. 

The will to neither strive nor cry ; 

The power to feel with others give ! 
Calm, calm me more ! nor let me die 

Before I have begun to live." 

Jesus, the "Calm Soul of Things/' said to this 
hurrying, worrying humanity, "Peace I leave with 
you, my peace give I unto you." The psalmist found 
that in God's philosophy of life there was a place 



The: Blessings of Soutude. 



67 



and time for restful leisure. "The Lord is my Shep- 
herd. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. 
He leadeth me beside the still waters." American 
society needs more calm, more quiet, regenerating 
breathing-spells. Its very purity, rejuvenation, and 
vitality require this, as trees do that rest in winter 
to recuperate for new blossoms and new fruit when 
spring and summer shall return. Society may be- 
come exhausting and enervating, — physically, men- 
tally, and morally. And that is fatal to a healthy, 
vigorous home life and national life. It is remark- 
ably true that there was never so much "society" 
in Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, or Paris as in its most 
thoughtless and corrupt age, when it stood on the 
brink of political anarchy and ruin. The culture and 
civilization of a people are found in their quiet soli- 
tude, rather than in their social whirl and whir. To 
what degree are the people thoughtful, meditative, 
given to study, self-discipline, and control ? This is 
the important question. To ask, How constantly 
are the people given to public excitement, amuse- 
ment, parade, to dress, show and gossip? is to ask, 
How much of the animal survives? Herbert Spen- 
cer would say, it is to ask, How much of the ape 
remains in their composition? This is not an objec- 
tion to society and social intercourse, but a protest 



68 



The: Religious Instinct of Man. 



against those social imperatives and tyrannies which 
leave men and women no time for solitude and its 
higher spiritual blessings. Mr. Ruskin has said, 
"An artist should be fit for the best society, and 
keep out of it:' Why the artist and not the lawyer, 
the author, the merchant, the teacher, the house- 
wife? We can not go to this extreme with all, — 
hardly with the artists, poets, or geniuses of any 
sort. This, however, is an extravagant, Ruskin- 
esque way of saying, Do not let "society" be your 
master ; do not be a slave to it ; if you are, you can 
be nothing else. 

We find the ideal man, Jesus, preparing for His 
life-work by retiring to the solitude of the wilder- 
ness, there to be tempted and tested. The Spirit 
led Him into the solitudes. Even by the Son of God 
and King of saints there were important questions 
to be settled, severe battles to be fought, high and 
holy masteries to be gained, before the great, char- 
acteristic achievement of His life mission could be 
wrought. Some people do not withdraw from the 
crowd long enough to become well acquainted with 
themselves. There are thoughts, convictions, and 
purposes here in the soul that demand a hearing. 
Possibilities are here, knocking at the door of their 
imprisonment and claiming their opportunities. Sit 



The Blessings of Solitude. 



69 



down and talk with yourself awhile ; lie down in the 
green pastures of meditation, and listen to the inner 
voices of your better self. Yes, and that quiet of the 
solitude may be disturbed as you learn there are bat- 
tles for you to fight, silent battles ; battles with the 
smokeless powder and noiseless guns ; but battles 
of duty and of destiny. One is honest with himself 
when alone walking beside the still waters of sober 
judgment. He dares then boldly to say to himself: 
"I know you. Xo masks ! Come, now, own up. 
Stop your pretense. Begin a better life. Break that 
chain. Shake yourself from the dust. Stretch your- 
self for your great duty. Xo cowardice ! X'o skep- 
ticism ! X^o nonsense ! Make a man of yourself, 
and that, quickly." 

It is said Yon Moltke won his greatest victories 
in his tent. Grant and Lincoln accomplished their 
most important work in solitude, often while ''soci- 
ety" was fast asleep, wearied out with the last ball. 
So there come to poets their brightest thoughts, to 
philosophers their most logical conclusions, to gen- 
erals their most victorious plans, to inventors their 
most useful discoveries, to reformers their weight- 
iest arguments and holiest inspirations, beside the 
still waters and in the green pastures of solitude. 
Arnold is not the only student of men and affairs 



^o The Reugious Instinct of Man. 

who has had occasion to observe, "How many minds 
— almost all the great ones — were formed in secrecy 
and solitude !" God called Moses into history from 
the solitudes of the desert where he "kept the flock 
of Jethro." Gideon received his divine commission 
as he threshed the wheat by the wine-press, where 
no sound was heard but the rhythmic beating of the 
flail. Elisha is following the plow when the mantle 
of Elijah, the prophetic call, comes upon him. David 
was herding the sheep of Jesse over in the pastures 
of Bethlehem when the order came for him to hasten 
to the battlefield, face the giant of Gath, and save his 
country. Shakespeare saunters into great London 
and to the throne of the world's literary empire from 
the obscure village of Stratford-upon-Avon. Lin- 
coln comes up from the silence and lonesomeness of 
the frontier wilderness to liberate a race and save 
the American Union. Jesus walks in from seques- 
tered and despised Nazareth to confound the doctors 
of Jerusalem. Out of the calm quietude of the sim- 
plest peasant life He comes to save and rule the 
world. How few of the great in song or art or war 
or statesmanship or philanthropy or eloquence have 
been contributed by "society/' by the world's spirit 
of pleasure ! 



The: Blessings of Solitude. 



71 



Out of the ranks of the rising generation must 
come the great men and women of the future. But 
if our young people give themselves incessantly to 
"society," permit "society" to claim all their time, 
brains, heart, nerve, and blood, there will be little 
hope for the future greatness of our boasted Amer- 
icanism. Nay, if our young men are determined 
even to find time for nothing but business and the 
noise and strife of trade, then there is coming into 
history an age destitute of heroism and intellectual- 
ity, destitute of genius and moral power, destitute 
of the elements that make nations great and civil- 
izations splendid. There must be time for the higher 
business of the mind and heart ; time for great books, 
and great pictures ; time for study and worship. It 
is a fact almost startling in its significance that our 
young men seem to be losing the ambition for edu- 
cation and the taste for study. Large as are the 
graduating classes of our high schools, seminaries, 
and colleges, the ratio of lady to gentlemen gradu- 
ates is constantly increasing. In many instances 
the young women are in the majority, and at one 
high school Commencement is was noticeable that 
only one member of the large graduating class was 
a man ; the only young man in that city, evidently, 



72 



The: Rexigious Instinct of Man. 



who had brains enough to seek and obtain a high- 
school education. But, they say, the young men 
have to work, and they early turn to business pur- 
suits. That means that the intellectualities are left 
to the women, while the men are giving themselves 
up soul and mind and body to the materialities. If 
this be true, and if this shall continue to be the tend- 
ency, there will certainly come a revolution in the 
character of our literature, intellectualism, and very 
civilization, and woman will be the thinker, writer, 
artist, philosopher, and scholar of the future. This 
is our only hope, if men in their love of gold shall 
lose their thirst for knowledge. 

We hardly realize what a power for intellectual- 
ity, and even morality, Nature may exercise over the 
human soul. The more highly developed man is in 
mind and heart, the greater teacher Nature becomes 
to him. We are apt to think Nature does its great 
work upon what we call the "children of Nature," 
the savage tribes of the earth. But we can not im- 
agine that the mountain ever said as much to the 
savage as Mont Blanc said to Coleridge, or that the 
sea ever spoke to the barbarian as it spoke to Byron, 
or that the trees ever grew as eloquent to the Indians 
as to Bryant, or that the flowers of the field ever 
carried to the rude Aztecs, who lived in perpetual 



The Blessings oe Solitude. 73 



gardens, what they carried to the soul of Words- 
worth by the pleasant lakes of England : 

" There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 
The earth, and every common sight, 
To me did seem 

Appareled in celestial light/' 

It is a beautiful, a sublime picture to the imagi- 
nation, that Matthew paints in the simple words, 
"That day went Jesus out of the house, and sat by 
the seaside'' At another time, "He went up into a 
mountain, and when the evening was come He was 
there alone." And again, "He was in the wilder- 
ness" Even when His disciples were with Him He 
led them, not along the dusty road, but through the 
ripening corn, and at times His weary feet were hid- 
den by the lilies of the field, which had lessons and 
sweet parables in them to tell of the kingdom of 
God. But the picture of Jesus alone in the moun- 
tain, or seated by the sea, is perhaps the most beau- 
tiful and suggestive. God seemed to say to Him 
and to all : 

" Come forth into the light of things, 
I^et Nature be your teacher." 

Our thoughts of God and life, of the world we 
struggle in and the world we dream of and look for, 
do not come to us along these hard streets where 



74 The Reugious Instinct of Man. 

the wheels rumble and the crowds surge. Nor do 
they come even in the quiet retreat of the office or 
the home, but rather where we walk by pleasant 
streams, tread on flowers, pat the great trees, watch 
the grain wave golden and opulent, and stand on 
the mountains and look out across the stretch of 
Nature's calm and passionless magnificence, 
" With all its grand orchestral silences." 

O, then what thoughts of God, and of what we 
would be, and of what we may yet become ! There 
is no book like it ; no pen like it ; no voice, no elo- 
quence, no great throb of thought like it, excepting 
the inspired Word. One may imagine the noble 
feeling that inspired the poet Thomson to sing : 

" Nature ! 

Enrich me with the knowledge of thy works. 
Snatch me to heaven." 

I pity that infidelity which has no eye for the in- 
spired beauty of the flowers ; which walks beneath 
the great trees as they clap their hands, but never 
thinks of the God whom they praise; which looks 
upon the grandeur of the ocean, and climbs the 
mighty hills, but is never inspired to worship the 
infinite Creator. Would we were as noble, pure, 
devout, religious as Nature would have us be — 
Nature, the gentle and generous motherhood of God ! 



The: Blessings of Soutude. 



75 



For there, there with Nature's strong tenderness 
and tender strength we have been restored and in 
much peace and assurance have 

" Smiled to think God's goodness flowed around our 
incompleteness, 
Round our restlessness His rest." 

It may be found that much of the meanness and 
wickedness of great cities is due more to the absence 
of the beauties and glories of Nature than merely 
to the crowding together of the people. The dearth 
of flowers and trees and singing birds, of green pas- 
tures and still waters, makes cities vicious. Why 
did Emerson say, "I always seem to suffer some loss 
of faith on entering cities?" Doubtless it was be- 
cause art had there superseded Nature, and there is 
not the same genuineness to art that there is to Na- 
ture. They say Socrates never cared to go beyond the 
bounds of Athens ; that accounts for his sour temper. 
Had he and Xanthippe gone more frequently into 
the country, there would have been less gossip and 
scandal about their domestic infelicities. Dante felt 
that he was an exile if out of the streets of Florence ; 
that accounts for his melancholy ; that ? s why he 
wanted to write about Hell. Milton loved old Lon- 
don, and his greatest poem was ''Paradise Lost." 

One of the blessings of solitude comes to us 



76 The: Religious Instinct of Man. 



through a patient and loving study of literature. 
We must find time for the poets, leisure to commune 
with these truest, most sympathetic interpreters of 
life. Did Jesus, when alone in the mount or the wil- 
derness, or by the sea, commune with David and 
Job, Solomon, Moses and Isaiah, the great thinkers, 
singers, philosophers and seers of Israel? How fa- 
miliar He was with the thought and language of that 
inspired literature ! His memory knew all the pleas- 
ant paths that led through the green pastures and 
beside the still waters of sacred song and prophecy. 
We must find time to commune, not only with Long- 
fellow and Tennyson, with Keats and Browning, 
with Milton and Shakespeare, but also with those 
sacred singers, with those vision-gifted sons of God 
who beheld the glories of the worlds to be, and sang 
of the new heaven and the new r earth, the kingdom 
of God among men. Is it not our privilege to culti- 
vate their music and harmony of thought, their 
cadence and rhythm of feeling, their melody and 
majesty of imagination? 

Should we not carry this idea of quietude into 
the study of the great poets and prophets? What 
can be more incongruous than studying Shakespeare 
in a theater? When I take up "Hamlet/' "Lear," 
or "Macbeth," permit me to lie down in the green 



The: Blessings of Solitude. 77 



pastures and walk beside the still waters of solitude, 
and there study these masterful delineations of char- 
acter, and find Shakespeare's philosophy of conduct 
and life. In the theater the appeal is to the senses, 
w T hile the show and tinselry, the acting and the actor, 
come between the student and the soul of the poet. 
There one must take the thought at second-hand, 
drink the draught of poetry from the tin cup or 
golden chalice of another man's interpretation, in- 
stead of drinking from the living fountain. Let 
Shakespeare interpret himself to your mind. Expe- 
rience the joy of finding his golden thoughts and 
pearls of fancy for yourself, as the miner who digs 
into the mountain, or the pearl-diver who plunges 
into the sea. How much less satisfaction comes 
from buying a trout of the fishmonger than from 
angling for it and catching it in the forest brook, 
where the darkened pool of still waters, shaded by 
the overhanging branches, invites the speckled beau- 
ties to a hiding-place ! One can not be satisfied by 
a simple description of the flower, or by an imita- 
tion in tissue paper, cloth, or wax. One would see 
it where it grows, pluck it with his own hand, and 
inhale its sweet fresh fragrance. So would we do 
with the thoughts and fancies, the wit and wisdom 
of the poet. Alone with Shakespeare ! Alone with 



78 The: Religious Instinct of Man. 

Dante ! Browning in a club ! How absurd ! Who 
does not feel that solitude is essential to a sin- 
cere study and deep understanding of his song? 
The infinite fuss, pretense, and impertinence of 
many a club ! A club for a shad-bake, not for 
Browning. Alone with Browning! Alone with 
Browning, or forever a stranger to him, and he for- 
ever a stranger to you. 

Have I been anticipated? Why not alone with 
Isaiah? alone with Psalmist and Psalm? alone with 
Job? alone with St. John and the Patmos vision? 
alone with Jesus, alone at His feet? Better by far 
is this than all the preaching in the world. All 
great preaching can but lead you there, and leave 
you there. Never should preaching take the place 
of a personal study of the inspired thought of in- 
spired men. Never should church-going be substi- 
tuted for the quiet hour of Bible-searching which 
brings the soul into rapt communion with the great 
spirits who have seen God face to face, and brought 
from the holy mount the heavenly message of law 
and love. Here in the Word find your ideals ; ideals 
which exist in no other book, and are found in no 
other history. Society presents but few ideals to 
aspiring souls. "Let us eat and drink, for to-mor- 
row we die." There is no idealism, no aspiration, 



The: Blessings of Solitude. 79 



no spiritual-mindedness in that; no looking into 
other and higher worlds ; no visions of God and 
hereafters. O for a calm, quiet communion with 
those great men who 

" Remind us 
We can make our lives sublime !" 

Alone with the Bible! Take the Good Book with 
you as you lie down in the green pastures and walk 
beside the still waters. 

We read in the biographies of Jesus that on 
several occasions He went out into a mountain to 
pray. Mark says, "In the morning, rising up a 
great while before day, He went out, and departed 
into a solitary place, and there prayed." It has been 
well said that "solitude is the audience-chamber of 
God." One thing is very noticeable in the life of 
Jesus : it can hardly be said that He ever offered a 
public prayer. He taught His disciples how to pray, 
but on that occasion, it is said, "He was praying in 
a certain place." His disciples had found Him en- 
gaged in secret prayer. At the close of His ministry 
He gathered the little band of disciples around Him, 
and offered that wonderful prayer which has been 
recorded by John. This is perhaps as nearly a public 
prayer as Jesus ever offered. Our Savior would 
teach the necessity of secret prayer ; and by His own 



So The Reugious Instinct of Man. 

act of withdrawing Himself even from His disciples, 
and seeking the desert or the mountain for prayer, 
He taught at least the appropriateness of solitude 
for communion with God. Did the Psalmist find a 
place for prayer in the green pastures and beside the 
still waters? Did the Lord restore his soul by that 
quiet communion in the sweet solitude? Mont- 
gomery calls prayer, 

" The upward glancing of the eye, 
When none but God is near." 

Who that has ever prayed does not know that the 
deepest prayer, the prayer that a crushed and broken 
heart sobs heavenward, can not be uttered where it 
will fall on other than God's ears? The prayer of 
penitence, the soul's cry to God out of its darkness 
and sin, the prayer for forgiveness and for the Di- 
vine patience and mercy, does not come forth in its 
tearful sincerity until the soul is alone with God. 
While we believe, as Victor Hugo said, that "cer- 
tain thoughts are prayers, and that there are mo- 
ments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, 
the soul is on its knees/' yet there are times when 
soul and body lie prostrate against the throne of the 
Divine Kindness, to be comforted "as one whom his 
mother comforteth." And though upon the street, 
on the mart, in the office or sanctuary, or at the fam- 



The: Blessings of Soutude. Si 



ily altar, the heart may pour to Heaven its prayer, 
there are also times when you would talk with God 
alone, out in the green pastures and beside the still 
waters, not even an angel listening, as there were 
times in childhood when you would talk to mother 
alone, and to no one but mother. If we look into 
the lives of the great men of prayer we shall find 
them offering their most heartfelt petitions in soli- 
tude. Whether it be Jacob at Bethel or Peniel, 
Moses on Sinai, Elijah on Carmel, or Jesus in the 
desert, what answers of blessing, light, and power 
come to him who there prays in solitude ! Wash- 
ington seeks the solitude of the wood that winter 
day at Valley Forge, and there in secret the father 
of our country prays to the Father of all, and he 
that hears in secret rewards openly. Lincoln is acci- 
dentally found in his room on his knees in tears, 
praying for our armies to the God of battles. How 
the secret prayers of Jesus prepared Him for great 
works ! He came from the solitude of the mount to 
hush the storm. He came from the solitary place of 
prayer to heal the leper and teach the people. He 
came from the loneliness of the mountain where He 
had prayed all night, when there went virtue out of 
Him, to heal the people of all manner of diseases. 
He came from that distant, secluded spot, where He 
6 



82 The: Religious Ixstixct of Man. 

prayed, in Gethsemane, to taste death for every man. 
O, to what heights of heroism may the manhood rise 
in secret prayer ; to what noble, Godlike purposes 
of self-sacrifice ! What power may fall upon the 
soul, and what a fitness for great deeds and useful 
living may come to a man in the place of secret 
prayer, where, in the calm and awful solitude, God 
is! Alone with God, Elijah heard the still, small 
voice, and the silence had a greater message than the 
thunder. Alone with God, Samuel heard the call 
of his high destiny. Alone with God, Moses beheld 
the burning bush and heard the voice divine. There 
are truths, deep, saving, comforting truths; there 
are calls, commands, and inspirations coming to us 
out of the sublime silences, which are too great and 
meaningful for words and language ; their voice is 
not heard. In these silences the Spirit breathes upon 
the waiting, weary heart the restful and assuring 
thought, "Be still, and know that I am God." 

" The Infinite always is silent, 

It is only the finite speaks ; 
Our words are the idle wave-caps 

On the deep that never breaks, — 
We question with wand of science, 

Explain, decide, and discuss, 
But only in meditation, 

The mystery speaks to us." 



The: Blessings oi< Solitude. 83 



From the solitudes the soul, restored, renewed, 
baptized with heavenly energies, comes forth with 
new hope, new faith, new courage, having found 
the finest philosophy of the everlasting and ever- 
blessed life in the green pastures and beside the still 
waters, alone with God. 

" Oft am I weary, reading, listening, 
But all I wish and long for is in Thee, 
Then silent be all teachers, hushed be all creation at the 

sight of Thee : 
Speak Thou to me alone." 



V. 



THE MINISTRY OF AFFLICTION. 

"For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, 
worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal 
weight of glory." — 2 Cor. iv, 17. 

A storm may help to make an oak, and a conflict 
help to make a saint. Moral vigor is largely the 
product of discipline. Sorrow has a helpful ministry. 
Affliction brings its gifts to character, and mis- 
fortune often holds a hidden but a heavenly benedic- 
tion. All refining processes are severe. Transfor- 
mations which enhance the value and the beauty of 
things are wrought by force. The flame purifies the 
gold. The sapphire's glow and splendor come from 
the heart of the precious stone, only on the wheel of 
the lapidary. The shapeless marble assumes a grace, 
only beneath the sculptor's chisel-stroke. Every 
piece of steel or iron that is to form a part of the 
useful machine must pass through the forge, writhe 
upon the anvil, and throb and quiver beneath the re- 
lentless hammer that fashions it for its place. The 

84 



The Ministry of Affliction. 



85 



very soil becomes bountiful with flowers and fruits 
and golden corn under the rough ministry of plow 
and harrow. As in the lower world of force and 
matter, so in the higher world of intellect and morals, 
everything is brought to its greatest beauty and use- 
fulness by severe, persistent processes of discipline. 
All goodness and grace of character, if not all happi- 
ness, though assisted by Divine grace, must grow 
out of toil, study, conflict, sacrifice, suffering. When 
we see, therefore, that work, drill, struggle, burden- 
bearing, and sorrow have a sacred use, and can not 
be evil, we come to accept and use them as the sculp- 
tor his chisels, the smith his hammers, the farmer his 
plows, the builder his tools, the worker upon the 
tapestry his mingled threads of every hue, — they help 
to make up our life and our manhood. 

"Affliction" is a general term, including all forms 
of discipline, — the trials, temptations, conflicts, and 
sorrows incident to Christian experience in this 
world. "Affliction" meant, to the apostles, perse- 
cutions, stripes, imprisonment, deprivations, insult, 
banishment, and even death. It may not mean all 
this to you and me. Some will insist that the heroic 
age has passed away, and there can be no heroic age 
without heroes. That would certainly be like the 
play of "Hamlet" with Hamlet left out. Again, it 



86 The Religious Instinct of Man. 

will be said, if there were as complete a consecration, 
as stern a righteousness, as quick a conscience in our 
Christianty as there were in Paul's, there would be 
quite as good an opportunity for the exercise of 
heroism now as ever there w r as. It takes great souls 
to make great sacrifices. Only a true hero will assert 
a conviction to his own injury, ostracism, and death. 

But it must be considered that the world has 
changed since Paul's day. Christianity has been 
giving men and society a more liberal and humane 
spirit. As a consequence, one is no longer in danger 
of his life for holding or expressing any conviction 
he may cherish. Affliction, then, may not mean per- 
secution for conscience' sake, yet it may have as 
significant a meaning. It may stand for poverty, for 
ill-paid toil, for hard battling with evil habit and base 
appetite, for the loss of fortune, or the greater loss 
of health, or the greatest loss of friends and loved 
ones. "Affliction" is a word that has a meaning to 
every heart ; it is interpreted in every man's daily 
life, in his prayers and tears. 

But with the promise given that "all things shall 
work together for good to them that love God," the 
Christian, who is seeking by his daily life to imitate 
Jesus Christ, to bless his fellow-men, and to glorify 
God, can not, with consistency, look upon any evil 



The Ministry of Affliction. 



87 



that may overtake him as unmixed with good. And 
if he look at it aright, from the standpoint of faith 
and Christian philosophy, no evil can overtake him. 
Everything becomes a means in his behalf, a means 
to his salvation, sanctification, perfection, and final 
happiness. Every affliction, whatever form it may 
assume, is to the good man a means of grace; it 
works for him, not against him, and it is a means, 
not an end. As it is a means, it is but temporal, 
while the end which it achieves is eternal. So Paul 
calls it "our light affliction, which is but for a mo- 
ment." And the affliction of a moment stands con- 
trasted w T ith the glory which is eternal : The cross 
temporal, the crown eternal ; the struggle temporal, 
the victory eternal ; the discipline temporal, the char- 
acter eternal; earth and life temporal, heaven and 
immortality eternal ! 

All affliction is to the good man disciplinary, and 
will come to an end. It will end in good, in glory. 
"Though weeping endureth for a night, joy cometh 
in the morning." Is it poverty that afflicts ? is it 
the unkindness of the world that afflicts? is it a dis- 
appointment of hopes that afflicts? is it temptation 
that afflicts? Whatever it be, it will not continue 
forever; its work will end ; its purpose will be accom- 
plished, and it will pass away. The cloud forms, 



88 The Religious Instinct of Man. 



drops its rain, and passes away, for the sun to shine 
and flowers to bloom. The storm gathers, purifies 
the air, and passes away, for the fragrant and health- 
ful calm to settle like a benediction on the land. 
Affliction comes, administers its discipline, and 
passes away, for the peace, joy, and glory to appear. 
Consider, then, the temporal nature of affliction in 
contrast with the eternal nature of the good which 
affliction is sent to accomplish. The fires of the fur- 
nace long since went out from which came the re- 
fined gold that will shine for a thousand years as a 
jewel or a crown. The Apollo Belvedere stands to- 
day a miracle of beauty, two thousand years after the 
chisel perished which gave it its immortal grace. 
Cologne's great spires pierce the sky, and will for 
centuries to come ; but the scaffolding beneath which 
they grew, and the tools which piled the marble 
toward the clouds, will vanish in a day. So afflic- 
tion is but for the moment ; it passes away, but leaves 
an eternal blessing ; it may vanish more quickly than 
furnace fire, or sculptor's chisel, or builder's scaf- 
folding; but the work it has done for the soul, or 
the work God has done by it, will be more lasting 
than jewels of gold or statues and temples of stone. 

The apostle here speaks, not only of the affliction 
of a moment in contrast with eternal glory, but of 



The Ministry of Affliction. 89 



our "light affliction/' and brings into contrast with 
this "an eternal weight of glory." He weighs life's 
trials and sorrows, its so-called evils and losses, 
against the good which they bring to us and leave 
with us. The affliction is placed in one scale of the 
balance, the glory in the other; that is "light," this 
is an "eternal weight." In his letter to the Romans 
he puts the great contrast in this language: "For I 
reckon that the sufferings of this present time are 
not worthy to be compared with the glory which 
shall be revealed in us." Here, then, is to be found 
the true philosophy of life. Here we discover an 
answer to the question, "Is life worth living?" 
Shutting our eyes to the final outcome of things, con- 
fining our thought and hope, imagination and faith, 
to things which are seen and temporal, we may come 
to doubt whether there be any good in the world, 
and whether existence be indeed a boon. But while, 
with Paul, "'we look not at the things which are seen, 
but at the things which are not seen,'' we discover 
that "our light affliction, which is but for a moment, 
worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal 
weight of glory." The attainment of this glory 
makes existence sublime ; the possibility of it makes 
life worth the living. The goal gives dignity to the 
race ; the victory gives greatness to the struggle. 



go The Reugious Instinct of Man. 

Glory may grow out of affliction. Every trial, 
every sorrow, every cross, has for the righteous soul 
a compensating element of good. And there are 
blessings which can come to us in no other way than 
through the toils, conflicts, self-denials, and even be- 
reavements, which make up life's affliction. It was 
only in the fiery furnace that the Hebrew youth 
could see "the Form of the Fourth." That Form, 
brighter than the flame, made the furnace more glo- 
rious than a regal palace. Only in the den of wild 
beasts, or in the prison, does Daniel or Peter find 
the angelic messengers powerful to shut the lion's 
mouth, or strong to break the chain of captivity and 
open the iron door. Only amid the frowning hills of 
Bethel, when his weary head was on the pillow of 
stone, could Jacob see the ladder reaching to the 
opening skies, thronged with radiant angels. Only 
from desolate, seagirt, rocky Patmos could John 
catch glimpses of the gates of pearl which swing 
open to the Paradise of God. When hunted like a 
partridge on the mountain, when driven to the 
gloomy cave in his extremity, when surrounded by 
foes who were driving him to battle, or w T hen smitten 
by the chastisement of Providence, David's soul 
quivered with strongest emotion, and woke the 
mighty harp of Israel to its sublimest themes. John 



The: Ministry of Affliction. 



91 



Henry Newman wrote "Lead, Kindly Light," when 
his spirit was depressed with loneliness and home- 
sickness while on a dreary voyage ; and Tennyson's 
greatest poem, "In Memoriam," comes to us baptized 
with the tears of his greatest sorrow in the loss of 
Hallam. Bunyan's great dream doubtless came to 
him in Bedford jail, and Dante's "Divine Comedy" 
was sung in exile. Goldsmith wrote his finest lines 
to keep away hunger and the sheriff. And it may be 
doubted whether "starry-minded Milton" had ever 
finished his magnificent epic had he not gone 
blind. In the darkness may come our finest in- 
spirations and our noblest thoughts. We may 
dream our happiest dream in the dungeon. From 
the stony pillar we may behold the gleaming lad- 
der against the sky, and from Patmos's crags which 
bruise our feet, sweet Paradise may bless our sight. 
The truest prayer or song that ever came out of the 
heart, the prayer or song that has added beauty to 
the life and nobility to the soul, has been evoked 
by sorrow, like fragrance crushed from roses or the 
incense touched with fire. 

Our sorrows give us such a glimpse of human 
friendship that they seem to form but the cloudy 
background for Kindness to paint its genial features 
on, and work thereon its bow of hope and promise. 



92 The Reugious Instinct of Man. 

One can almost afford to be ill for the kind inquiries 
that are made of him, and the good wishes that are 
sent. I do not believe in waiting until people are 
dying or dead before saying good things about their 
virtues. But many a person never loved humanity 
worthily until, in his bereavement, he found how 
kind and generous and sympathetic his neighbors 
were. When death threw its sable wing over the 
home, and the people said such gentle things about 
the dead, and such hopeful things, it was n't so dark, 
a ray of kindly light broke in, and the afflicted will 
carry with them the memory of that kindness and 
sympathy as long as they carry the memory of their 
grief. The child, frightened by the thunder and the 
blackness of the gathering storm, runs to mother; 
her smile and song assure and quiet him, and he will 
remember mother's face and voice as long as he re- 
members the storm, yet would he be willing to hear 
the thunder again for a chance to hear that mother 
sing. There is compensation somewhere that gives 
value to every trial. The seamen of Galilee would 
be willing to have the storm rage again if they could 
hear Jesus say, "Peace, be still." The three weary 
apostles would gladly climb the mount again in the 
night to witness a Transfiguration ; and the man re- 
stored to sight would almost be willing to go blind 



The Ministry of Affliction. 93 



again to have the great Physician open his eyes, and 
to feel the thrill of that life-giving touch. So there 
are men and women who would be willing again to 
pass through any affliction which they have experi- 
enced for the good which they are wise enough to 
see has come to them through it in the past. David 
said, "It is good for me that I have been afflicted." 
The time comes in the experience of the good man 
when he can look back and recognize the beneficial 
character of what he may once have called his bad 
luck, his misfortune, a calamity, a disaster, life's 
affliction, and God's chastening. Many a man never 
knew the value of Divine grace, nor appreciated his 
religion, until he passed through trials and tempta- 
tions. You do not have to ask about the stanchness 
of a ship that has sailed through a hundred storms. 
You do not have to test the temper of a sword that 
has fought a hundred battles. You do not have to 
examine the soundness of the walls that have stood 
a hundred cannonadings and baffled a hundred fierce 
assaults. And the religion which comes to man's 
help in every affliction, which comforts him in sor- 
row, encourages him in his trial, helps him bear his 
burden, conquer his temptations, subdue his passions, 
and dispel his doubts and fears, needs no defense of 
logic or eloquence ; its very helpfulness is its defense, 



94 The Religious Insti:nxt of Max. 

and in that is the proof of its divinity. So if afflic- 
tion gives us a better knowledge :: human kindness, 
and a clearer, more positive proof of God's provi- 
dence, and of the Divine nature of the Gospel, it 
works out for us a good against which gold would 
weigh as nothing in the balance. ■ 

Then, many will confess that they did not actu- 
ally know themselves until they had been brought to 
the test by some backset or some conflict. I have 
known men and women, possessing a fear of death 
which they could not shake off. to be brought 
to the very portals of the unseen world, and 
finally restored with the old fear gone. Their faith 
was stronger, their hope was brighter than they 
knew : and ever after, the brightest spot in all the 
past was that long and severe illness which demon- 
strated the genuineness of their religious experience. 
Afflictions of another sort, reverses of fortune, loss 
of wealth, the death of friends, and. still more trying, 
the ill-treatment of their fellow-men, calumny and 
misrepresentation, have come upon persons with a 
force which they never supposed they had strength 
and grace enough to bear. But they found them- 
selves battling manfully against their adverse cir- 
cumstances, with a patience, courage, faith, and hope 
of which they never before knew themselves to be 



The: Ministry of 



Affliction. 



95 



possessed. They did not lose their temper and be- 
come bitter, but remained sweet, dignified, and 
manly. They grew mild, gentle, and considerate ; 
not resentful and unforgiving. Until affliction 
comes, we may not, as Longfellow says, 

" Know how sublime a thing it is 
To suffer and be strong." 

There is a fine thought, quaintly expressed by one 
of the earlier poets, in the words : 

" He who hath never warred with misery, 

Nor ever tugged with fortune and distress, 
Hath had no occasion, nor no field to try 
The strength and forces of his worthiness." 

The world does not see of what fine, genuine stuff a 
man is made until he is brought to some severe trial 
that makes his virtues and his nobility shine out. 
I have known men to lose their all in a single calam- 
ity, a great fire; in one night a fortune went up in 
smoke, or in some financial panic the accumulations 
of a lifetime have been swept away; but they were 
just as sweet-tempered in their poverty as they had 
been in their wealth, and men said of such or such 
a man : "Why, he is the very same man. How nobly 
he stands it ; how strong and well-poised he is ! 
There is a man of character; there is a Christian 
whose religion is a practical reality." Then, having 



96 The: Religious Instinct of Man. 



passed through the ordeal without a murmur, such 
men will forever be thankful for the experience and 
discipline of it, as Job must have been. There is 
only one thing greater than not losing your poise 
when you lose your fortune; that is, not losing it 
when you gain a fortune. How refreshing to hear 
some old acquaintance say of a man, "He is just as 
sensible as when he was poor; just as kind, sym- 
pathetic, obliging !" He realizes that wealth has not 
added any new quality to the clay. But it does not 
afflict a man to grow rich. To grow rich with sim- 
plicity may, however, be as virtuous as to become 
poor with dignity. 

But there are still greater and more abiding bless- 
ings wrought out for us by affliction. It makes and 
develops character. From this thorny vine burst 
flowers of beauty and fragrance. On this rough 
and gnarled tree grow the most delicious fruits. 
Every grace that adorns character is developed there- 
from. Paul says, "We glory in tribulation; for 
tribulation worketh patience, and patience experi- 
ence, and experience hope," essential elements of a 
strong and righteous character. Again, he declares 
that God chastens us for our profit, that we may be 
partakers of his holiness and yield the peaceable 
fruits of righteousness. Highest character reflects 



The: Ministry of Affliction. 



97 



the Divine character, partakes of "the Divine holi- 
ness." Peter teaches this same truth when he says, 
"The God of all grace who hath called us unto His 
eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suf- 
fered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, 
settle you/ 5 That means perfection, power, and 
poise of character. Jesus Himself was "made perfect 
through suffering." Stability, firmness of moral 
character, are brought about by trial and burden- 
bearing and the resisting of temptation. The gen- 
tleness, sympathy, charity, self-sacrificing dispo- 
sition, so characteristic of Jesus, belong to a man 
of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And only the 
man who has been tempted in all points like as we 
are, can be touched with the feeling of our infirmity. 
Affliction mellows the heart and opens it toward 
humanity, makes us more gentle, more charitable, 
more forgiving, more patient with other men's fail- 
ings. Many a man has been nobler from the very 
hour in which a darling child took sick and died; 
he has been more chaste in his language, more tender 
in his feelings, more manly in his business trans- 
actions, more benevolent and prayerful. Until then 
he has been absorbed with the world. He permitted 
politics, society, business, pleasure, indifference to 
religion, to harden his heart. He came to have no 
7 



98 The: Religious Instinct of Max. 

feeling, no sympathy for the sorrowing and strug- 
gling world about him. He became self-centered, 
narrow, uncharitable. But death came to the home, 
and a sweet spirit vanished like a visiting angel from 
the little family circle ; and the man's hard heart was 
broken. The stern, indifferent, cynical spirit became 
tender, sympathetic, and kindly. I heard a strong 
man once say that he paid no particular attention to 
other people's children until he had lost one of his 
own ; after that, he felt like taking in his arms every 
little boy or girl he met. Sorrow had found his 
heart. It has happened that from the hour in which 
sickness or death, or some great accident or some 
reverse of fortune, came to a man's family, he has 
been more vigorous, determined, and successful in 
fighting old habits and appetites, and in resisting the 
lifelong temptations. So the truth does not seem to 
be overdrawn when the poet says : 

" Affliction is the wholesome soil of virtue, 
Where patience, honor, sweet humanity, 
Calm fortitude, take root and strongly nourish." 

Paul speaks of "the glory which shall be revealed 
in us." A true interpretation of the Word of God 
brings us to the belief that the Gospel is here to 
fashion human character; that the greatest triumph 
of grace is the regeneration of the conscience, will, 



The: Ministry of Affliction. 



99 



affections, and aspirations of the soul. And the 
teaching is, that man's highest destiny is reached by 
that development of the spiritual nature, by that 
acquirement of the moral beauty and power which 
carry in themselves all the conditions, all the re- 
sources, all the germs and potencies of an endless 
happiness, all the sweet, divine meanings of immor- 
tality and heaven. The glory which is wrought out 
for us of "eternal weight" is that which is wrought 
in us. And the eternal weight of glory wrought out 
for us by the trials and sufferings (which sooner or 
later we all. shall know), while it belongs to char- 
acter, belongs to the future. Nothing goes over into 
eternity but that which belongs to mind and spirit, 
to the manhood or w T omanhood of us ; and that the 
"eternal weight" of glory, spoken of in the text, has 
reference to future blessedness is shown in the lan- 
guage of the apostle Peter: "Now for a season, if 
need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temp- 
tations, that the trial of your faith being much more 
precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be 
tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honor 
and glory, at the appearing of Jesus Christ." 

This is the Christian philosophy of life. It is 
but a preparation for a higher, grander life. Mortal 
must put on immortality. As we have borne the 



ioo The Reugious Instinct of Man. 



image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of 
the heavenly. But this higher life, this blessed im- 
mortality, this image of the heavenly, must be 
wrought dut for us by the discipline of the world 
through which we are passing. The Patmos 
dreamer, in happy and inspired vision, saw a multi- 
tude which no man could number, standing before 
the throne, clothed in white robes, with palms in 
their hands, and they sang the song of redemption. 
"These are they who have come out of great tribu- 
lation, and have washed their robes, and made them 
white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they 
before the throne of God, and serve him day and 
night in his temple ; and he that sitteth on the throne 
shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no 
more, neither thirst any more ; neither shall the sun 
light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which 
is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and 
shall lead them unto living fountains of waters ; and 
God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." 
Then, then, the "far more exceeding and eternal 
weight of glory" shall be theirs. But this is a vision 
to us, a prophecy, a promise. We see the glory from 
afar. We stand on the great and high mountain 
of blest anticipation. It is now only as a golden 
dream; soon the morning will break with all its 



The Ministry of Affliction. 



ioi 



splendors, and we shall see face to face. Face to 
face with the Paradise of God; face to face with 
angels and archangels ; face to face with those who 
sweetly walked with us awhile, but now in forms 
celestial walk with God ; face to face with the King 
in his beauty ! Welcome the toil and sacrifice ; wel- 
come the reverses and bereavements ; welcome the 
"light afflictions" which make for the "eternal weight 
of glory ! ? ' In the light of this blessed hope we sing : 

" 'T is sorrow builds the shining ladder up, 
Whose golden rounds are our calamities, 
Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God 
The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed." 



THE ANGELS' EASTER GREETING. 

"Come, see the place where the Lord lay" — Matt, 
xxviii, 6. 

We; seem once more to hear the prophet's voice 
rousing the world to the glory of a new hope, to the 
assurance of a new life : "Awake, awake ! put on 
thy strength, O Zion : put on thy beautiful garments, 
O Jerusalem !" We are surrounded with emblems 
of this mighty thought and glorious fact of resur- 
rection. Spring breaking the bonds of winter; a 
golden morn dawning from the gloomy night ; 
flowers blooming from the snow; jubilant song 
bursting from sleep's silences ; Christ rising from 
the grave ; life, eternal life, springing out of death ! 
To-day, earth and heaven, Magdalene and angel, 
stand face to face. Upon Mary's face are the shad- 
ows of a great woe, the tears of hopeless love, the 
agony of despair. The angel's face is radiant with 
the light of a wondrous truth, a blessed promise, 
a glorious hope. Nothing can be more beautiful 

I02 



The Angels' Easter Greeting. 103 

than an inspired face, a face aglow with the inner 
light of an illumined soul. We count it a privilege 
and pleasure to look upon the countenances of great 
men. We should like to have seen them when they 
had their greatest thoughts, their holiest dreams, 
their brightest visions, — the face of Moses when he 
came from the Mount of God ; the face of Joshua 
when he commanded the sun to stay his chariot; the 
face of David when he struck the harp of Israel into 
immortal music ; the face of Paul when he wrote, 
"O death, where is thy sting;''' the face of John as 
he stood on the great and high mountain and saw 
the Holy City; but, above all, the face of that mighty 
angel who had taken the place of the Roman guard, 
rolled back the stone from the door of the sepulcher 
of Jesus Christ the Son of God, and, sitting there, 
clad in habiliments of celestial splendor, cried to the 
sorrowing woman and to a dying world : "He is 
risen ! He is risen !" When the angel spoke these 
wonderful words, "his countenance was like the 
lightning." And did not Mary's face catch the light 
celestial as the truth dawned in her broken heart? 
Has not humanity's face become radiant as the 
angels' with the joy and hope of resurrection and 
eternal life? 

God's angels are greeting us this happy morn, — 



io4 The Religious Ixstixct of Man. 



the angel of music, the angel of beauty, the angel 
of revelation, the angel of faith : ''Fear not ; come, see 
the place where the Lord lay/'' Let the Church 
be God's strong and beautiful angel to-day ; sitting 
at the door of an empty sepulcher, like the heavenly 
messenger of old, her countenance is like the light- 
ning, and her raiment white as the snow. The light 
of a glorious hope is on her brow, a flame of holy 
joy and ecstasy kindles her eye. her robes glisten 
with unearthly brightness, and from her inspired 
lips come the words that glow and thoughts that 
burn: "He is risen! He is risen !" Like an angel 
of light in the darkness of death's sad mystery, the 
Christian Church comes with its blessed gospel of 
Jesus and the resurrection. 

77 was morning. The golden east was lifting up 
her gates ; the hills stood glorified ; the vines and 
olive-trees and palms were glistening with their 
baptism of Orient dews. Nature was jubilant; the 
sky smiled with a wondrous and benignant radiance ; 
the air was fragrant with the incense of the fields ; 
the birds were on the wing, heralding the day, and 
all the sweet and holy land of God was waking to 
the brightest morn that ever dawned upon the world. 

It was morning. The Holy City was rousing 
itself from a troubled sleep. A sigh of wonder came 



The: Angels' Easter Greeting. 105 



up from the heart of a nation. Every face wore a 
question. Every conscience trembled. Every eye 
bore a startled look. Awe settled upon the people, 
and though they knew not why they felt it but feel 
it they did, that something wonderful, aw r ful in its 
grandeur of meaning, was about to happen. The 
veil was lifting from the most impressive picture 
ever wrought by the providence and power of God 
upon the imperishable canvas of history. The pic- 
ture of a conquered tomb, a risen Lord, a redeemed 
humanity ! 

It was morning. Three forms, boldly silhouetted 
against that bright background of the dawn, like 
saints which masters old surrounded with a golden 
halo, moved toward the garden of the tombs, bear- 
ing in their hands sweet spices and precious oint- 
ments to anoint the dead. Mary Magdalene, Mary 
the mother of James, and Salome seek the newly- 
made sepulcher of Joseph of Arimathea, where they 
have entombed Jesus, their Lord. 

The thought of those holy women was : "Who 
shall roll us away the stone from the door of the 
sepulcher?" It took strong men to roll that great 
stone to the door of the tomb. The chief priests had 
said to Pilate, "Command that the sepulcher be made 
sure." Pilate replied, "Ye have a watch ; go your 



io6 The: Reugious Instinct of Man. 



way, make it as sure as ye can. So they went, and 
made the sepulcher sure, sealing the stone, and set- 
ting a watch." They had seen it all, those poor, 
helpless women. They had noticed what strength it 
had taken to roll that great stone against the door ; 
they had seen that seal of authority which had been 
placed upon it, and which no man dared to break ; 
they thought of that watch, the powerful, brutal 
guard, able to resist any person who might come to 
tamper with that seal. "Who," they say among 
themselves, "who shall roll us away the stone from 
the door of the sepulcher?" God had answered that 
question, for "when they looked, they saw that the 
stone was rolled away." Xo mortal hand had been 
laid on the strong arm of the appointed guard ; no 
mortal hand had broken that Roman seal ; no mortal 
hand had rolled away that great stone from the door 
of the sepulcher. A supernatural power, a super- 
natural authority, had opened the tomb and called 
the dead to life. The astonished women entered the 
tomb to face, not an armed and accoutered Roman 
guard, but angels from heaven, with countenances 
like the lightning, and with garments white and 
glistering like the snow. And as the women were 
afraid and bowed down their faces to the earth, the 
radiant angel spoke : "Fear not ye ; for I know that 



The Angers' Easter Greeting. 107 

ye seek Jesus which was crucified. He is not here ; 
for He is risen. Come, see the place where the Lord 
lay." It was morning, morning forever! 

When the devout women who came with spices 
and sweet odors to the tomb heard the angel's start- 
ling and glorious words, they dropped their precious 
burden at the open door, and the sweet perfume filled 
the air and rose to heaven as emblematic of the joy 
and praise of hearts made glad with a new promise 
and a new hope. But to-day, the fair, pure hands 
of the world's devout and holy w r omanhood come 
laden with earth's most beautiful flowers, and cast 
them before the empty tomb and at the feet of the 
angel Church which repeats the sweet story of the 
Resurrection in every land and nation this glorious 
Easter morning. From the open door of a van- 
quished tomb ascend the gratitude and thanksgivings 
of the nations, the voice of praise, and the spirit of 
joyful worship. 

What a change has come to the meanings of life 
and death, that humanity can now look into a tomb 
with joy ! This has ever been the place of mystery 
and fear, of sorrow and despair. Here love turns to 
agony, and memory to an infinite pain. Here laugh- 
ter becomes tears, and music only melancholy sighs. 
Here hope's lamp is dashed to fragments, life's stars 



io8 The Reugious Instinct of Man. 



of joy sink behind the clouds of doom. Here the 
heart breaks. O, how dread, how fearful is the 
tomb ! Men have passed it with averted gaze. They 
have spoken of it in sad whisperings. But to-day 
the angel speaks, as in the olden time he spake to the 
trembling women, saying : "Fear not ; come, see the 
place where the Lord lay." The terror has gone, 
the gloom has vanished, the grave has lost its dread- 
fulness, the power of death has been broken, "The 
Lord is risen." 

This Easter morning is glorious with its history, 
and radiant with its prophecy. It comes to human 
life once more with the Gospel of Jesus and the Res- 
urrection. It throws its light into the wondrous 
future, revealing the onward, upward, eternal sweep 
of this existence : worlds opening into worlds, years 
into eternities, earth into heaven. O the possibilities, 
O the power of an endless life ! 

When the angel bids the holy women, "Come, 
see the place where the Lord lay," he would have 
them look into the emptiness of the sepulcher, and 
know that One who had been there was not only 
greater than the temple, but even greater than the 
tomb, "He is not here; He is risen." This is no 
deception; the guards have not taken your Lord 
away. This is no hallucination, no dream, no trick 



The: Axgees' Easter Greeting. 109 



of imagination; it is real. "Come, see the place." 
The angel might have said : "This is a physical real- 
ity. I am not talking to you in the language of 
mysticism and transcendentalism. I do not speak 
to you in figures of rhetoric ; this is not a mere 
spiritual resurrection ; this is a physical resurrection. 
'Come, see the place where the Lord lay.' He is 
not here. His body is not here. I am not speaking 
to you metaphysically. I do not mean simply that 
Christ is risen in your hearts, in your faith, in your 
hope, in your life, and that his resurrection is merely 
a subjective ideality; it is an objective reality. I ask 
you not to look into your hearts, into your own con- 
sciousness, into your own feelings; but, 'Come, see 
the place where the Lord lay.' Just as truly as that 
His death, His crucifixion, was an objective reality, 
so truly is His resurrection. Just as truly as His en- 
tombment was an objective reality His disentomb- 
ment is an objective reality. 'He is risen.' 'Come 5 
see the place [not where the Lord lies, but] where 
the Lord lay.' 'He is not here.' " 

May we this Easter morning grasp the signifi- 
cance of the emptiness of the grave where the Lord 
lay ! Was it not part of that holy ministry of our 
Lord to teach men the meaning of what we call, 
death? "He tasted death for every man." Not only 



no The: Religious Instinct of Man. 

in expiation of the sins of the whole world, but to 
show man the final, ultimate harmlessness of death. 
He would take away its sting, its fear, dread, terror. 
"Come, see the place where the Lord lay." He slept 
in the tomb to show us how harmless it is, how brief 
and temporary its power and its thralldom, how cer- 
tain its conquest. Having seen the place where the 
Lord lay, the place where you and I will some day 
sleep, we have looked into — yes, and in a sense we 
have penetrated — the mystery of death. Dark as is 
the gloom that gathers there, there are shinings be- 
yond, mighty mornings bursting through the long, 
sad night. 

Christ is not here; humanity is not here; life, 
sweet, beautiful life, is not here. "Come, see the 
place where the Lord lay/' and from this empty tomb 
let all the horizons lift! Lift up your heads, O ye 
gates ! A larger life, a greater world, opens before 
all hope and faith and aspiration. 

The Christ by his resurrection gives to life and 
all its aims and purposes a vaster meaning. He sets 
man to calculating on the eternities, to reckoning 
with the endlessness of being. It will not do to look 
upon the grave as the end of life and the close of 
being. "Come, see the place where the Lord lay." 
"He is not here." This is not the end. Life has 



The Angels' Easter Greeting. hi 



passed through the grave ; life is greater than death. 
Man is mightier than the tomb. Come, and see the 
power of an endless life. Death can not destroy it ; 
the grave can not imprison it. Come and see the 
emptiness of the tomb and realize the abundance of 
the life of the Son of God who has said, "I am come 
that ye might have life, and that ye might have it 
more abundantly life more mighty than death, life 
greater in its power than the grave, life endless, 
supreme, divine ! 

Startling as was the angel's revelation, it was 
soon confirmed by even a greater than an angel. 
Marvelous as w T as the evidence of the empty tomb 
into which the holy women looked with awe and 
wonder, that evidence was to be strengthened and 
made unquestionable by the living, speaking evi- 
dence of Him who was mightier than the tomb and 
stronger than death. The angel bade the women go 
and tell the disciples that Jesus had risen. They ran 
with the glorious message and met, not an angel, 
but the risen Lord Himself, who greeted them with 
that assuring salutation, "All hail !" and they came 
and held Him by the feet, and worshiped Him. To- 
day the world lies prostrate at the feet of Jesus ; for 
round the earth there speeds with the light of Easter 
morning Christ's blessed and eternal "All hail !" 



ii2 The: Religious Instinct of Man. 



In that is our hope. The Conqueror of the grave 
hails the dying world this morning. Let the sick and 
dying hear it ; let the sad and broken-hearted hear 
it ; let the sleeping heroes whose dust has consecrated 
our land to freedom hear it ; let all who are in their 
graves hear it!— "All hail! All hail!" Let the 
flowers breathe it forth in fragrance; let the sweet 
bells of Easter chime it round the world; let the 
organ peal it forth in mighty waves of hallowed 
harmony ; "All hail ! All hail !" 

When the Son of God came from the tomb He 
conquered two powers ; He conquered death, and He 
conquered the human heart. He who brings the 
grave into subjection, brings the heart of man into 
captivity. The truth of the resurrection of Christ 
has a beautiful, powerful fascination. All men are 
touched by its mystery and significance. It has a 
meaning for every heart. Go where you may, you 
find graves, death, bereavement. There is something 
in this universal sorrow, universal affection, univer- 
sal longing, which welcomes the blessed truth of 
the resurrection. This Gospel of the risen Christ 
moves on through hearts and homes and nations 
and ages, like a mighty river making deserts blos- 
som with gladness, and filling the earth with the 
prophecy and hope of a new life. Eliminate that 



The: Angels' Easter Greeting. 113 



one magnificent fact, "He is risen," and you end 
the power of Jesus Christ forever in this world. If 
mankind can be made to believe that Jesus did not 
come forth a Conqueror of Death and the Grave, 
they will in sadness, if not in bitterness, repudiate 
the authority — yes, even the virtue and honesty, if 
not the sanity — of Jesus Christ. But while men be- 
lieve that what the angel said w r as true ; while men 
believe that what these honest evangelists wrote is 
true ; while men believe that what the best brain and 
best heart of the ages have accepted is true; while 
men believe that the doctrine which has given to 
modern life its hope and beauty and greatness is 
true, — so long will they yield to the authority of 
Jesus Christ, and so long will Jesus Christ push His 
moral conquests and maintain His throne of power 
in this world. "Every knee shall bow and every 
tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory 
of God the Father." 

This is our creed, — the creed that is saving the 
race ; the creed that is dispelling the darkness ; the 
creed that is binding up the broken-hearted; the 
creed that is changing the world's mourning into 
dancing, putting off its sackcloth, and girding it 
with gladness: "I believe in God the Father Al- 
mighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus 
8 



ii4 The: Religious Instinct or Man. 

Christ his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived 
by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary; suf- 
fered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, 
and buried. The third day he rose from the 
dead. He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the 
right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from 
thence he shall come to judge the quick and the 
dead." 

Wonderful cradle, wonderful tomb ! Yonder the 
angels, with hallelujahs, sweep along the hills; but 
here they linger with mute lips and muffled harps. 
There the King is born ; but here the King lies dead. 
There the world's Hope appears ; here the world's 
Hope is buried. The wise men pour forth the gold 
and frankincense and myrrh at the cradle. The holy 
women bring sweet spices to the tomb. From that 
cradle-side the shepherds go to herald the wondrous 
birth; from this tomb-side disciples will hasten to 
publish a more wondrous resurrection. The triumph 
of Jesus Christ is to be achieved in this tomb. Here 
He is to prove His power, His authority, His Divine- 
ness. Though the sick have been healed by His 
touch ; though the sea and storm have obeyed His 
command ; though devils have fled from His presence 
and trembled at His word; though the dead have 
heard His voice and come forth, — yet there remains 



The Angers' Easter Greeting. 



115 



to be achieved that supreme miracle of His Divine 
authority and power, His own resurrection from the 
dead. Miracle upon miracle He has wrought, pre- 
cious stones upon precious stones He has laid in 
building the monument of His greatness and immor- 
tal glory among men, and now His own escape from 
the tomb, His own resurrection from the dead, is to 
be the keystone in the arch of His triumph, through 
which, as a King, He shall ride forth to the spiritual 
conquest of the nations of the earth. 

This doctrine of the resurrection is vital in the 
scheme of redemption ; it is the necessary climax of 
Christ's teaching. Without it the whole Gospel fab- 
ric must crumble into ruin. As without the fact of 
the resurrection, the birth and teachings and death 
of Jesus Christ would have had no authoritative, no 
historic significance and no redemptive efficacy, so 
without the doctrine of that resurrection, theology 
and preaching can have no power over the con- 
sciences and convictions of men. Therefore, we 
teach and preach the truth of the resurrection ; for 
the word has been given : "If thou shalt confess with 
thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and shalt believe in thine 
heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou 
shalt be saved/' 

But more, Christ hath by His own resurrection 



n6 The Reugious Instinct of Man. 

pledged the resurrection of humanity, and, "as in 
Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made 
alive." When we follow the angel to the tomb of 
Christ and see the place where He lay, we follow that 
angel to every tomb, to every believer's tomb, every 
hero's tomb, every loved one's tomb. Nay, that 
risen Savior permits every disciple to look into his 
own tomb with a smile of fearlessness and triumph. 

"The dead shall be raised." The earth and sea 
shall give up their dead. All that are in their graves 
shall come forth. But many still hesitate to accept 
this great truth by making too small and ignoble an 
estimate of the power of God. Jesus said to certain 
persons who were disposed to deny the possibility of 
the resurrection, "Ye do err, not knowing the Scrip- 
tures, nor the power of God." When we think of 
human power, how feeble a thing it is ; when we see 
man's weakness and helplessness in the presence of 
death, we are apt to reason that whatever man can 
not do, is impossible, and we measure all possibility 
by human power. The limitations of human power 
are made the limitations of the possible. So when we 
stand in the presence of death, and see the kindly 
and skillful physician baffled, the highest science 
baffled, the affection of motherhood and the pleading 



The Angels' Easter Greeting. 117 



tears of childhood baffled, some are so swept away 
by their emotions, so controlled by their feelings, 
that they do not stop for cool, calm reasoning, but 
say, "Death can not be conquered ; the grave can not 
be made to give up its precious treasure ; the resto- 
ration of life to the dead is impossible." In all these 
statements we find that some broken-hearted ones do 
not stop calmly and logically to think. They do not 
make a clear and reasonable distinction between 
what is possible to human power, and what is pos- 
sible to Divine power. No intelligent being could 
intelligently worship a God who could not raise the 
dead. We may say with all reverence, and yet with 
sincerity, that we could not bow the knees to a Being 
who has not the power, when He shall choose, to ani- 
mate with a new and a celestial life the precious dust 
we laid away in the tomb. The power that made 
that dust once live in sunny beauty can make it live 
again, and with a beauty that shall never fade — 
angelic and immortal. Nor shall our hope be 
clouded by mysteries and problems which doubt and 
unbelief may try to gather about the grave and about 
this great promise of God. They of old, not satis- 
fied with the blessed assurance of the resurrection 
of the dead, sought to reason their way through all 



n8 The: Religious Instinct of Man. 

the problems of the future life, and became perplexed 
with the question, "How are the dead raised up, and 
with what bodies do they come?" Still do many 
bewildered minds permit this question to shut out 
the light and to plunge them in the darkness of 
doubt. It is enough, poor, fearful heart, it is enough 
to know of this dear, departed life, of this spirit 
flown from earth to heaven, that in the resurrection 
"God giveth it a body that pleaseth Him." Such a 
body He originally gave it, and we were satisfied. 
It was a lovely body to our eyes ; it is lovely in mem- 
ory to-day. And that body, which it shall please 
God to give that redeemed spirit in the morning of 
the resurrection, will satisfy our eves and heart. It 
will be a celestial body, not, as it was, a terrestrial 
body. "There are celestial bodies and bodies ter- 
restrial ; but the glory of the celestial is one, and 
the glory of the terrestrial is another." That resur- 
rection body will be a spiritual body. "There is a 
natural body, and there is a spiritual body." It will 
be a heavenly body. "As we have borne the image 
of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the 
heavenly." 

In that day the redeemed and glorified saints 
of earth, robed in the beauty of their immortality, 



The Angels' Easter Greeting. 119 



may lead shining angels on wings of light to be- 
hold this world's triumph over death, and cry with 
joy: "Come, see the place where the Lord lay. 
Come, see the place where humanity lay. He is not 
here. He is risen. They are not here. They are 
risen with their Lord." 



VII. 



THE KNIGHTS OF THE CROSS ON OLIVET. 

"After the Lord had spoken unto them, he was re- 
ceived up into heaven, and sat on the right hand 
of God." — Mark xvi, 19. 

We are met in the grand old faith that gave 
valor to Tancred and Coeur-de-Leon, eloquence to 
St. Bernard and Peter of Amiens, and the noble 
spirit of self-sacrifice to Paul and to the martyrs. 
We count it all honor to belong to that brotherhood 
whose standard is the cross and whose ideal is the 
Christ. To go no farther back, eight hundred years 
ago there sprang up, from every country of Europe, 
legions of brave men, toilers in the fields, mechanics 
of the shops, students of the schools, priests of the 
cloisters, soldiers of the camps, paupers, princes and 
kings, to march to the rescue of the Holy Land from 
the power of the profane and barbarous Moham- 
medan. Their sacrifices and sufferings, their cour- 
age and devotion, the purity of their personal morals, 

120 



Knights oe the Cross ox Olivet. 121 



and the heroic splendor of their deeds, lighted up the 
pages of history and romance with glory, and won 
for them an undying fame. 

To say that many a crusader was a fanatic is not 
to disparage the nobler qualities of those men, nor 
is it to deny that they were animated with lofty 
motives and inspired with a sacred devotion to the 
right, as they were given to see the right. It may 
be doubted whether a mean-souled man can ever 
become a fanatic. Indeed, every great fanatic of 
history has possessed great qualities of mind and 
heart, great vigor of conviction, great powers of 
persuasion, great intensity of personality. A weak, 
groveling, stupid, vacillating mind never made a 
great fanatic like Peter the Hermit or Richard the 
Lion-hearted. We shall therefore find that there is 
a way to study the old crusaders, an honest, legiti- 
mate, and philosophical way to study them, so as to 
see heroes in them, the cleanest, bravest, loftiest- 
minded heroes of history. Get at the great, deep, 
inner purpose of their souls, and it is all heroic and 
grand. Look at them superficially, glance at their 
methods, their manners, their customs, and they will 
often seem dwarfed and morally deformed, narrow- 
minded and fierce, splendid barbarians. But rightly 
understood, philosophically studied, they become to 



122 



The Religious Instinct of Man. 



our thought and admiration as manly a brotherhood 
of men as fame ever crowned with immortality. 

There was every reason for the people of their 
age to hold them in admiration, to laud their virtues 
and to sing their deeds. They stood for the best and 
strongest and most conscientious manhood of the 
time. They were the living personifications of the 
highest virtues that were then taught and compre- 
hended. With all their faults, they were the van- 
guards and heralds of a more rational, humane, and 
righteous civilization. From their ranks rose the 
first knights. The virtues of their characters, the 
greatness of their deeds, the sublimity of their faith, 
have inspired the emulation of the ages and given to 
knighthood a glory which any man may be proud to 
wear. 

Men who are pledged to the protection of the dis- 
tressed, to the defense of womanhood and virtue, 
to the maintenance of right against the encroach- 
ments of power, to the preservation of Christianity, 
to the glorification of the Cross, and to the purifica- 
tion of their own characters and lives from every 
stain of impurity and dishonor, may well be counted 
among the true defenders of the faith once delivered 
to the saints, and the Divinely-ordained allies of the 
Church and benefactors of the race. 



Knights of the Cross on Olivet. 123 

In the faith of the knights of the glorious past, 
the knight of this twentieth century still confesses 
that he Lelieves in Jesus Christ and believes that "the 
third day He rose from the dead : He ascended into 
heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the 
Father Almighty." 

Once more in reverential imagination we stand 
on Olivet. Once more we come as Knights of the 
Cross and as true Templars to celebrate the triumph 
of the Captain of our salvation, and to learn the les- 
son which His glorious ascension has to teach. That 
Christ-life, from its lowly birth in the manger at 
Bethlehem to the great white throne of heaven, was 
not only redemptive, but also educational. It is the 
ideal toward the perfection and beauty of which this 
common life of ours will eternally aspire. Jesus is 
a prophecy of the perfect humanity. We follow His 
steps to the destinies, to the immortalities. The 
prophet sang, "How beautiful upon the mountains 
are the feet of Him that bringeth good tidings, that 
publisheth salvation!" When He of whom the 
prophet spake came to His glorious ministry, the very 
hills invited Him to their solitude, and the moun- 
tains, in their calm majesty and rugged strength, be- 
came the appropriate scenes of His life's most won- 
derful experiences and achievements. Hattin, Her- 



i24 The Reugious Instinct of Man. 



mon, Calvary, and Olivet, — what glory must forever 
settle on those hallowed heights ! Hattin, the 
"Mount of Beatitudes/' where the Divine Teacher 
spoke the new-life philosophy which was destined 
to revolutionize character and society; Hermon, 
"Mount of Transfiguration/' where came to human 
eyes the full revelation of the Christ-nature and 
glory, and the opening of upper worlds in prophecy 
and promise to earthly hope ; Calvary, "Mount of 
Crucifixion/' where, in the sublime act of an in- 
finite self-sacrifice, the Son of God secured a world's 
redemption ; and Olivet, "Mount of Ascension," 
where those blessed feet last touched the earth; 
where light supernal in golden cloud swept down; 
where angels stood, and sons of men, with wonder 
gazing into heaven ; whence rose our Lord, with im- 
mortality transformed, and radiant in habiliments 
celestial, to triumph over death and nature, and sit 
upon the throne of God. 

The Ascension was the necessary climax of that 
Divine life on earth ; it was the triumph of the God- 
man, of a humanity imbued with and incarnating 
Divinity. To highest human life the Sermon on the 
Mount might have been called the climax. The 
highest reach in the existence of a Homer is the 
"Iliad;" of a Moses, the "Decalogue;" of a Con- 



KNIGHTS OF THE CROSS OX OUVET. 125 

fucius, ''The Analects;" of a Goethe, "Faust;" of 
a Dante, "The Divine Comedy; 1 ' of a Shakespeare, 
"Hamlet of any one man, his greatest intellectual 
achievement, his noblest expression of thought and 
truth. But Jesus does not come to the climax of 
His power and greatness in the utterance of the 
"Beatitudes" or the enunciation of the Golden Rule. 
His work is more than intellectual, more than liter- 
ary, more than artistic, more than ethical. He has 
a power deeper than words, more creative and re- 
creative than precepts. 

In His transfiguration He reveals a glory which 
penetrates all His humanness, and sets forth in its 
glistering silences a higher truth, a more subtle and 
spiritual revelation of the Infinite, than any language 
can convey. On the Mount of Beatitudes, Jesus is 
the Prophet, the Teacher, and they who listen won- 
der at the gracious words that fall from His lips. 
But on the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus is the 
Son of God, and they who behold Him, worship. 
Here the voice comes from the golden cloud which 
makes His word authoritative : "This is my beloved 
Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear ye Him." 
This may appear to some of us as the summit of 
greatness, and it is to those who think a life has 
risen to its highest power and achievement w T hen the 



126 The Reugious Instinct of Man. 

world acknowledges its authority. Plato's name 
came to stand for philosophy, Caesar's for empire, 
Raphael's for art. Each becomes authoritative in 
his realm. Is Jesus simply monarch in the realm 
of ethics ? Is He simply a genius ? Is His authority 
limited to any one sphere of thought and life? Is 
His power merely the power of originality, the power 
of a new suggestion, a new idea ? No ; Jesus comes, 
not only with a new standard of greatness, but with 
a new greatness; not simply with a new precept, but 
with a new personality. In the greatness of His per- 
sonality and in the personality of His greatness, He 
transcends all the historic ideals. 

The highest' order of power comes to the world, 
not out of a man's wise and eloquent utterances; 
not out of his brightest self-revelations, in displays 
of genius or in manifestations of authoritative influ- 
ence ; but rather out of his self-sacrifices, out of his 
willingness and ability to suffer that a world's suf- 
fering may be alleviated. There may be something 
eternally just in the world's disposition to lift the 
hero to the highest seat of fame. The knight stands 
higher than the monk. The most imposing monu- 
ments are not raised to the honor of poets, philos- 
ophers, artists, and inventors, but rather to heroes, 
patriots, and martyrs. To give or to risk the life for 



Knights of the Cross ox Ouvet. 127 



humanity, — in that lies the highest power to bless 
and save. 

When this Xazarene, this sweet-tongued Prophet, 
stood on Calvary, with all the purpose and willing- 
ness of self-sacrifice in Him, He rose above men, out 
of the realm of mere humanity, into the higher Son- 
ship of God. Blount by mount He had risen, from 
power to power, from duty to duty, from glory to 
glory, until He stood alone, supreme, with a name 
above every name. Yonder on the Mount of Beati- 
tudes, Jesus may welcome Socrates, Buddha, Zoro- 
aster, and Confucius as fellow T -teachers of universal 
truths, co-leaders of the world's thought. On the 
Mount of Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah, who 
had stood in the down-shining glories of heaven, 
the one on Sinai, the other on Carmel, are seen hold- 
ing converse with Jesus, and they appear with Him 
in glory as His own face shines with celestial light. 
But on Calvary, Jesus stands alone. There He 
rises to the self-sacrifice that gives Him power to 
save. The Cross lifts that name above every name, 
and gives to Jesus a power above every power. In 
His infinite wisdom He could say as He could see, 
"And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw 
all men unto me." Not by the wonder of His mir- 
acles ; not by the transcendent beauty of His life ; 



128 The: Reugious Instinct of Man. 

not by the awe-inspiring manifestations of His Di- 
vine glory ; not by the revelations of His wisdom, the 
charm, the universality, and illuminating power of 
His word and truth, but by His Cross, is He drawing 
the world unto Himself. 

If, in studying the history of the past nineteen 
centuries, we would understand the deepest philos- 
ophy of it, we shall find it in the Christian religion, 
and among the many elements of power, of civil- 
izing power, to be found in Christianity, we must 
see that, before all others and above all others, the 
Cross is the central, dominant, all-conquering ele- 
ment of power in the Gospel system. Paul under- 
stood this when he exclaimed, "God forbid that I 
should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus 
Christ !" The old crusaders and the knights of old 
understood this when on their banners they em- 
blazoned the immortal legend, "In Hoc Signo 
Vinces." 

Did not the Son of God, then, reach the sublime 
climax of His earthly life on Calvary? Had there 
been no more to that existence ; had it ended there ; 
had the tomb defied His authority and held Him in 
its cold and cruel thralldom, Jesus Christ would not 
be known to us this day as a saving, conquering, 
world-enlightening Power. His Cross, the symbol 



Knights o£ the Cross on Ouvet. 129 

of your faith, would not be on your banners, nor 
would it be leading the nations upward and onward 
to the higher life. Historians might have recorded 
Christ's boast only sneeringly to prove that He who 
prophesied His own resurrection was but an enthu- 
siast, if not an impostor. They might have dwelt 
with supercilious condescension upon His amiable 
character and gentle life, and have dropped a tear 
over His grave as over the grave of a Socrates or 
a Buddha, and then have dismissed His divine claims 
with a smile of pity. But His resurrection from the 
grave gave a final heavenly sanction to His word and 
work, and made His death mean more than simple 
death. That resurrection gave to the death of Jesus 
Christ a sacrificial and a redemptive significance. 
It belonged to God's world-saving plan. It fulfilled 
prophecy. It demonstrated the supernatural power 
of His life and the Divinity of His mission. Into the 
world's gloom and darkness it brought the light of 
immortality, and above the opened tomb dawned the 
opening heaven. 

For forty days Jesus walked with men after His 
resurrection. That short space of time seems but 
the halting of the chariot of Him who, rising 
from the tomb, was on His triumphant way to the 
skies and to the throne. He tarries as if the human 
9 



130 The Religious Instinct of Man. 



heart were longing but to gaze upon Him in the 
greatness of His resurrection strength. He walks 
again along the shores of the pleasant sea, and treads 
once more the fields and hills, and talks with those 
He loves a few more sweet and hallowed days. Then 
He stands upon Olivet. More gracious still are 
his heavenly words : His face grows bright with an 
unwonted beauty ; His garments glisten again as on 
the Mount of Transfiguration ; the very air throbs 
as though angelic wings are beating it : a cloud of 
light comes like a golden chariot ; and, as it touches 
the hill, He lifts up His hands and blesses them, "And 
it came to pass while He blessed them He was parted 
from them, and carried up into heaven. And the 
cloud received Him out of their sight." Mark adds, 
''He was received up into heaven, and sat on the 
right hand of God." Wonderful scene ! Translated 
while stretching forth His hands in blessing. Trans- 
lated as the triumphant climax of His redemptive 
mission. Translated that, having risen from the 
grave. He might nevermore see death. Translated 
that He might sit upon the throne of His glory, the 
King of kings and Lord of lords forever. Trans- 
lated that He might teach dying men of immortality, 
and lead the way to worlds celestial and to the com- 
pany of angels and archangels. Translated to teach 



KxiGHTS OF THE CROSS OX OUYET. 131 



men that the way of exaltation is by self-sacrifice. 
Translated to make us understand and know that 
there is a resurrection power promised to all who 
find their way to truth and duty and self-sacrifice. 
Translated to give humanity the hope that an ascen- 
sion awaits every soul that stretches forth its hands 
to bless. 

Is not this Christ-life a glorious prophecy? Does 
it not foretell the coming of a Christlike humanity? 
Does it not reveal the possibilities of this common 
manhood? "Follow me," is the inspiring command 
of our Leader and Lord. Our feet may tread the 
same beautiful summits which the Son of God has 
glorified. As teachers of the heavenly truth we, 
too., may climb the Mount of Beatitudes and speak 
the word of light and hope. Where character shines 
forth in all the purity and beauty of the spirit which 
was in Christ, there is the Mount of our Transfigu- 
ration. Where glows the mind with chaste and hal- 
lowed thought, where burns the heart with pure af- 
fection, where the spirit is wrapped in the flame of 
devotion, and where the seraphic fire of hopeful 
aspiration kindles and illuminates the soul, there is 
man transfigured. Where the Christ is reflected in 
character, there is man glorified, there becomes he a 
light in the world. 



132 The Rkugious Instinct of Man. 

But has not the Son of God led the way to sub- 
limer heights than these? Is not Calvary higher 
than the Mount of Beatitudes or the Mount of 
Transfiguration ? Where Christ leads, humanity will 
follow ; follow to the cross ; follow to that exalted 
heroism which becomes a saving power to the world. 
What power, more signally than all others, has 
broken the shackles, liberated the bound, lifted up 
the fallen, overthrown oppression, defended the 
weak, carried liberty to the captive, and sent light 
into every dark place of the world? The power of 
self-sacrifice, the power of the Cross, the power of 
Calvary. The men who have laid down their lives 
to protect the virtue of womanhood, the sanctity of 
home, the freedom and glory of their country; the 
men who have died for liberty and justice, for na- 
tional honor and for human progress, have followed 
the Christ to Calvary, and mingled their blood with 
His to redeem a world. There is a Gethsemane in 
every great life, a Calvary for every brother of the 
Nazarene, a Cross for every Son of God. 

And who shall follow Jesus Christ to the Mount 
of Ascension but he who has followed Him up into 
the Mount of Beatitudes to hear His truth and utter 
it ; up into the Mount of Transfiguration to see His 
glory and reflect it in his own character ; and up into 



Knights of the: Cross on Ouvet. 133 

the Mount of Self-sacrifice, into Calvary, to behold 
His death and to catch the spirit of it, the spirit of 
a world-helping, world-saving heroism? Yes, there 
is an Olivet of Ascension in every Christlike life. 
For him who has spoken the enlightening truth, the 
word of hope and kindness and love, and has by the 
spotlessness and integrity of his character been a 
light to the world, and has by his devotion to others, 
his self-abnegation and sacrifices, conferred benefits 
and life upon humanity, — for him there is a glorious 
immortality, there is a heavenly ascension. Of him 
the Christ has said, "He shall sit with me in my 
throne." And may it be that there are heights be- 
yond, — other Beatitudes, other Transfigurations, 
other Calvaries, other Olivets ? Do we climb moun- 
tain by mountain to the destinies? Is this forever 
and forever the way toward the infinite, the immor- 
tal, the divine ? 

There is a path of moral ascension marked out 
for the nations and for the race by the footprints of 
the Son of God. There is a power in the Gospel 
lifting us to a higher plane, exalting humanity to a 
more complete and perfect life. We have tried to 
show that the way to the Mount of Ascension was 
by the Mount of Beatitudes, the Mount of Transfig- 
uration and Mount Calvary, or by truth, character, 



134 The Reugious Instinct of Man. 

and sacrifice. So are the nations to rise to the higher 
life, ascend to liberty, equality, peace, brotherhood, 
happiness, by the power of truth, the power of char- 
acter, and the power of self-sacrificing love as mani- 
fest in Jesus Christ. The Cross has come to symbol- 
ize this threefold power. It is the sign and emblem 
of Christianity. As nations have followed that Cross 
they have ascended to a higher civilization, and in 
that Cross we find the philosophy of all our modern 
progress. Not by force, but by truth ; not by genius, 
but by character ; not by the sword of ambition, but 
by the Cross of self-sacrifice, have peoples been con- 
quered and civilizations transformed. The nations 
of widest influence and greatest power to-day are 
the nations to whom the Cross has the profoundest 
significance, the Sermon on the Mount the most 
Divine authority, and the character of Jesus Christ 
the greatest charm and inspiration as their ideal. 
"By this sign conquer." By this sign have we thus 
far conquered ; conquered ignorance, error, bigotry, 
superstition, oppression, and every form of human 
wrong. The victories which the Cross has achieved 
are prophetic of a still more glorious future ; for the 
future belongs to truth, to character, to heroism ; 
hence to an enlightened, enfranchised, enthroned 
humanity. The "kingdom of heaven" opens its gates 



Knights of the Cross on Duvet. 135 



on Olivet. There the terrestrial and the celestial 
meet. There the world takes on its immortality. 
There the everlasting gates are lifted up. There life 
receives its recompense, virtue its reward, manhood 
its crown. 

The ascension of Christ is the prophecy of the 
ascension of humanity. As true knights of the Cross 
we celebrate with faith and adoration the historic 
ascension of our common Lord. With hope and 
gratitude we celebrate the promised ascension of 
our redeemed humanity. While w 7 e with angels 
join to sing, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even 
lift them up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of 
Glory shall come in/' with joy we hear that Voice 
Divine of our ascended Lord, "Come, ye blessed 
children of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared 
for you from the foundation of the world." 



VIII. 



THE POETS OX IMMORTALITY. 

"This mortal must put on immortality. 3 ' — I Cor. 
x v, 53- 

There: comes a time in every life when full upon 
the soul dawns the pleasing, awful thought — "Eter- 
nity." By the laws of nature, the mind of childhood 
and of youth is fascinated with the present. Life's 
springtime takes on the colors and the brightness of 
the season of flowers and green fields, of babbling 
brooks and singing birds, when the soul trips bare- 
footed through the dewy grasses, and barebrowed 
through the sunshine and the rain of life's joys and 
hopes and promises. Life's summer-time has barely 
reached its golden glory, and man has but called 
upon his energies for their utmost endeavors, when 
the shadows begin to lengthen, and the days to 
shorten, and the face to wear the seriousness of the 
great question, "What shall the harvest be?'' When 
the noble ship puts to sea, the mind of the voyager 

136 



The Poets ox Immortality. 137 



is taken up with a contemplation of his environment. 
The ship, itself a miracle of mechanism, a marvel 
of invention and construction, excites his wonder and 
admiration and engrosses his thought. The ocean, 
strange, novel, beautiful in its calm, magnificent in 
its commotion; the rising and setting suns; the 
nightly marshaling of the stars ; the moon, throwing 
its lane of beams athwart the sea; rolling clouds, 
gathering storms, breaking tempest, skyward-mount- 
ing billows ; then sunshine, breaking through the 
blackness ; calm, succeeding tumult ; all is strange, 
exciting, awe-inspiring, full of mirth and fear, full of 
laughter and prayer, — and through it all the good 
ship plunges on and on, tirelessly, persistently, on 
and on. But soon the voyager begins to count the 
days. The novelty is gone. His thoughts now turn 
to the other shore. His conversation dwells upon 
the possibilities and probabilities of the time the ship 
will take in reaching port. He thinks and talks of 
the country for which he is destined, of anticipated 
pleasures in meeting friends or holding converse 
with great minds, whose thoughts he has already 
learned to love in science or song, in music or story. 

How like this life of ours ! So full of wonder 
and mystery ; so strange, exciting, problematical ; 
so beautiful, fascinating, new ! What wonder that 



138 The: Religious Instinct of Man. 



the half of it is spent in happy, laughing thought- 
lessness; in simply becoming familiar with the bark 
and the sea ; in getting our lungs full of life's pure 
air, our eyes full of its stars, and our souls full of its 
beauty and poetry, its thunder and shout, its majesty 
and charm ! But the time comes when we find our- 
selves thinking into the future. We begin to count 
the years, to calculate the probabilities. The insur- 
ance companies demand a greater premium for in- 
suring our lives, and they figure out before our eyes 
the probable number of years we have to live. Then 
we begin to think of our destination, of the other 
shore, of the new world ; nay, of the old world ; of 
the old, old, eternal world. And we fall to thinking 
of friends and kindred there. As we call them up 
to fond memory, one by one, we are surprised to 
find how many there are. Then the good and the 
great, the loving and the chivalrous, the heroic and 
the saintly, — behold, they increase, grow to "a great 
multitude which no man can number!" Who that 
has passed the meridian of life does not think seri- 
ously about eternity ? Who has not opened his mind 
to the sublime thought of immortality? 

There is something very significant about this 
idea of immortality. It blossoms in every breast; 
it shines, starlike, in every soul. Men can not drive 



The Poets on Immortality. 139 

it from their minds; they can not lie it or ridicule 
it from the mind, until they have driven and lied 
and ridiculed all other noble thoughts from the mind. 
The frost of unbelief that blasts that flower will 
wither and kill every other sweet and tender, fra- 
grant and beautiful idea that blooms in the garden 
of the soul. The skepticism or the materialism that 
would quench that sweet and radiant star would ex- 
tinguish every ray of soul-illuminating hope. Im- 
mortality ! greatest thought that man can think ! As 
old as life and birth; as precious as memory and 
love ; as universal as tears and death ; as pure as mar- 
riage ; as sweet as motherhood ; as great as the heart 
of man ; as tender as the soul of woman ; as true as 
the justice of God ! 

Again, it is significant that the noblest thinkers 
of every race and people have surrendered their 
minds to a contemplation of this theme in all its 
phases of mystery and fascination, its elevating in- 
fluence, its comforting and hope-inspiring power. 
The child of Nature ; man in his primitive simplicity, 
uncorrupted by what we call society, worldliness, 
civilization; the old Norse, the Indian, and the Af- 
rican, where he has not become degenerate; all the 
virile, original races of men, have seemed to possess 
an innate idea of immortality. And man at his in- 



140 The; Religious Instinct of Man. 

tellectual best, mind in its highest development, has 
not only cherished the glorious hope of immortality, 
but has been ready and able to give a reason for that 
hope. Turn to the Greeks when intellect reaches the 
perfection of subtlety and power, and you find their 
mightiest minds — their Plato ? their Socrates, their 
Aristotle — reasoning well on immortality. Turn to 
the Romans in their best estate of philosophic acu- 
men, in the golden age of their eloquence, — then 
their Cato, Tully, and Seneca accept and champion 
the truth of immortality. Turn to those subtle, 
astute, penetrative thinkers of old India, and behold 
them weave their finest silken threads of dialectic 
wisdom into the beautiful demonstrations of immor- 
tality. Turn to the Egyptians, in their intellectual 
ascendency, when stupendous monuments and mag- 
nificent temples spring up beneath their artistic 
hands, when the world's commerce crowds their his- 
toric Nile, and when science is created and flourishes 
at the command and by the fostering care of their 
consummate genius, — then, all their literature, all 
their magnificent art, all their laws and institutions, 
no less than all the symbols of their religion, are 
charged and filled and aglow with this truth of im- 
mortality. Turn to that wonderful people who have 
given law to the ages ; to that people who talked with 



The: Posts on Immortality. 141 

God, and became the custodians of the oracles of 
heaven ; to that people whose mighty mind was the 
first to grasp and the first to set forth hi clear thought 
the oneness of Divinity, — turn to that chosen race 
which could boast such superlative thinkers as 
Moses, Job, David, Solomon, Isaiah, and Paul, and 
you trace in the history of their thinking the steady 
growth of this idea from its original, innate inti- 
mations, on to the full glory of the most confident 
faith and most positive and sublime declarations 
that ever inspired the human mind with hope. 

This has been the faith of the best minds at their 
highest pitch of intellectualism. And we find these 
most consummate reasoners of the races and the 
ages arguing, not to find their own way out of dark- 
ness and despair to the light and hope, but rather 
to lead or lift weaker minds to the sublime prospect. 
They have been the surefooted guides to the heights 
of truth. They have given to others the reasons 
for the hope that was in them, and they have encour- 
aged timid and faltering minds to hold fast their 
faith, and press on to the summits of full vision, 
where truth's splendors penetrate all mysteries and 
dispel every shadow and veil of doubt and fear. 

There come times when strong minds must plead 
the cause of justice, virtue, law, liberty, and right- 



142 The: Reugious Instinct o£ Man. 

eousness, lest the people in their thoughtlessness lose 
faith in the fundamental principles of character and 
of social order. But it were as reasonable to expect 
a thoughtful, great-minded man to find it necessary 
to reason himself into a belief in the truth and reality 
of nature, of law, of mind itself, as to find it neces- 
sary to reason himself into a belief in the reality of 
immortal life. Surely, one who doubts his immor- 
tality may well begin to ask : "What is the matter 
with my mind that it can not believe what the great- 
est minds have believed? What is the matter with 
my reasoning powers that they hesitate to follow 
the clear-eyed, sure-footed thinkers of the ages, up 
to the sublime heights of their hope and faith ?" If, 
standing before a masterpiece of a Raphael, or read- 
ing the noblest lines of a ■Milton or Shakespeare, or 
listening to the most inspiring and magnificent com- 
position of a Mendelssohn or Wagner, I do not com- 
prehend, enjoy, or appreciate it, I am forced to 
ask, "What is the matter with me ? what is the mat- 
ter with my mind?" And if I have not even the 
good sense to ask that of myself, then surely others 
will ask it of me. 

One may train his mind to doubt any truth. He 
may train his mind to doubt the reality of matter; 



The Poets ox Immortality. 



143 



he may train his mind to doubt the reality of spirit ; 
he may train his mind to doubt the reality of both 
matter and spirit; he may train his mind to doubt 
his own mother's virtue, to doubt the honor of man, 
the existence of justice, the genuineness of love. He 
may school himself to disbelieve in law and order, 
in government, society, and humanity. His mind 
may become an anarchy, and he may dethrone his 
own reason. So men may train their minds to doubt 
God, doubt Christ, doubt the Bible, doubt immortal- 
ity, and even doubt the doubtfulness of their own 
doubt, — this is agnosticism. But surely mind has 
a higher function than this ; mind has a nobler mis- 
sion than this; mind was created for greater think- 
ing than this ! 

It is significant that not only the great exponents 
of rational inquiry, the deep, penetrative, logical 
minds of the world's history, have entertained the 
pleasing hope of immortality and have been able to 
base that hope on a sure foundation of reason, but 
that the greatest interpreters of human feeling, as 
well, the poets, have cherished this "fond desire." 
Yes, singing out of the depths of the world's great 
heart, giving voice to affections, memories, aspira- 
tions, longings, hopes more subtle than philosophy, 



i44 The: Reugious Instinct of Man. 



more assuring than arguments, more rational than 
reason, more logical than logic, the poets have felt 
the reality of the immortal life. The heart's feeling 
at its best, at its purest, at its most exalted and re- 
fined estate, cherishes this truth of the eternal years. 
And until Love lies dead, and Memory has become 
deaf to all the sweet voices of the past; until Hope 
has lost its vision of happiness, and Aspiration lies 
with palsied wings in the dust of despair; until all 
that makes the soul of man or woman beautiful, 
noble, angelic, and godlike has perished in the heart, 
that heavenly flame, that divine star of immortal 
longing, can never be extinguished. Why have these 
great souls of song, whether old Homer, or the Vedic 
Singers, or the Hebrew Bards, or the "honey- 
tongued Shakespeare" and "starry-minded Milton," 
the sweet-voiced Tennyson and deep-toned Brown- 
ing, — why have they in all their full-throated music 
of the human heart assumed that man is immortal? 
Because they were poets ; because, had they not as- 
sumed and believed this, they could not have been 
poets; because, in singing the best feelings of the 
soul, they could not leave out of their song that 
sweetest, purest, and most triumphant note ; because 
they could not interpret the heart of man without it. 



The: Poets on Immortality. 145 



Whittier understood this. The soul's feelings 
were revelations of immortality to him: 

" The solemn joy that soul-communion feels 
Immortal life reveals ; 
And human love, its prophecy and sign, 
Interprets love divine.'' 

We may say to any great thinker, any poet, any 
deep, genuine soul, any loved and vanished one : 

" Come, then, in thought, if that alone may be, 
O friend! and bring with thee 
Thy calm assurance of transcendent spheres, 
And the eternal years." 

And now, if my own heart stagger at any blow of 
sorrow, bend broken over any sweet and soul-for- 
saken dust, lift up its eye in vain to see a light beyond 
the gloom, must I not ask, "Why art thou cast down, 
O my soul? why art thou disquieted within me?" 
Why shall I not listen to the singers God has sent, 
great souls of hope and brotherhood and love — souls 
that can weep with those that weep, and rejoice with 
those that do rejoice? Shall I not follow them, 
follow them out of the darkness of my grief into the 
light of a glorious hope? Have I lost faith in all 
great minds and all great thinking? Have I lost 
touch with all great hearts and all great feelings? 
10 



146 The Reugious Instinct oe Man. 



Am I deaf to the music that is about me, blind to 
the light above me, dead to the God and Fatherhood 
and Love enfolding me ? "Hope thou in God," who 
hath brought life and immortality to light in the 
Gospel of Jesus Christ. Listen, listen to the singers 
God hath sent to sound the note to which all love and 
hallowed memory, all faith and hope, accord; the 
golden keynote of life's holy meaning — man's im- 
mortality. 

It is when holding communion with the Spirit 
of inspired song that the troubled, doubting, restless 
soul finds quietness and assurance to sing with Read : 

" No more, no more 

The worldly shore 
Upbraids me with its loud uproar ! 

With dreamful eyes, 

My spirit lies 
Under the walls of Paradise. ,, 

The surest and safest teachers are the poets. 
Their song comes from every fiber of their being. 
Not from brain alone, or heart, but from the whole 
man, like the mighty river into which a thousand 
mountain springs pour their rich, clear treasures. 
The fountains of reason, feeling, imagination, mem- 
ory, hope, faith, conscience, affection, will, — all send 
forth their rivulets to swell the river of the poet's 
song. And this song is truth ; truth in its beauty, 



The Poets ox Immortality. 



i47 



rhythm, cadence ; truth living and divine ; truth ap- 
pealing to all there is in man and all there is of man, 
because coming from all there is of man, the singer, 
the seer. That which appeals to feeling must have 
feeling for its inspiration. That which moves a con- 
science to accept it must have moved a conscience to 
utter it. That which convinces the reason must have 
gone forth at reason's high command. That which 
kindles hope must have caught its fire and flame 
from Hope's divine and heavenly glow. Hence is it 
that poetry has greatest power to teach truth. It 
appeals not to a single part of the man alone, to a 
single phase of mind or mood of thought, but to 
the whole man. And only when the whole man sees 
the truth, feels the truth, and accepts the truth, does 
truth become his light and life, the dominating force 
of his being. Where truth is so presented that it 
appeals to only part of the man, it fails to find its 
throne in him. It appeals only to his judgment, or 
his feeling, or his imagination, or his conscience, 
whereas it should affect his reason and feeling and 
imagination and conscience and will, every mental 
and moral power and mood. This is why we get so 
many half truths and quarter truths in philosophy, 
science, and history. These are all partial, exclusive, 
limited. Each has its channel, groove, or rut. It has 



148 The: Religious Instinct of Man. 

naught to do with anything outside its own narrow 
province, and is very jealous of its prerogatives. 
That is why philosophical teaching, scientific teach- 
ing, and historical teaching are so narrow and often 
bigoted, prejudiced, and unreliable. There is no 
such narrowness and bigotry in poetry; "it has all 
truths to teach, and all there is of all truths. It has 
the liberty of the universe. It shall teach the truth 
of history, philosophy, science; the truth of nature, 
man, and God ; the truth of all worlds, all changes, 
all the divisions of duration ; the truth of life and 
death and immortality ; of hell and earth and heaven ; 
of the yesterdays, the to-days, the forevers. 

The poets, always and everywhere, have a hear- 
ing, find a listening ear; nay, a listening fancy, a 
listening conscience, a listening soul, a listening 
manhood and womanhood. The poet wins, com- 
mands, and holds attention because, as Emerson 
says, "All men are poets at heart." But are not all 
men poets at brain as well as at heart? Poetry has 
been called "the record of the best and happiest mo- 
ments of the happiest and best minds." And when 
Professor Jones, of Glasgow University, who has 
written so wisely on Browning as a philosophical 
and religious teacher, says, "A poetic fact, one may 
almost say, is any fact at its best," that would make 



The: Poets on Immortality. 



149 



poetry the best kind of philosophy, science, history, 
ethics, or theology. Why, is not poetry the best 
articulation of humanity's creed on all things ? Yes, 
any fact at its best is the poetic fact. The poets are 
the seers, the souls that see facts ; facts at their best ; 
full-orbed, complete facts; facts ablaze in all their 
splendid intensities with the light that lighteth men 
to wisdom and to God. Is not this the reason why 
God chose so many poets to write His Word, the 
reason why so large a portion of the Bible is poetry ? 
The grandest utterances on Nature to be found in the 
Sacred Book are poetical ; the ethical precepts which 
jewel these pages as the stars jewel the sky are 
nearly all in the form of poetry. The prophecies 
foretelling the Savior and the glory of His reign 
burst forth in stately measure. The celebration of 
the most significant events in the history of God's 
people is ever in the high and elegant and rhyth- 
mical strains that may be sung. The language of 
the seers, when aflame with the glory of their heav- 
enly visions, is poetical. The angels of God, in earth 
or in heaven, are all poets when they speak to men 
or lift their seraphic voices in praises unto God. 
We find, in studying the world's great literatures, 
that the poets are rarely, if ever, atheistic. The 
musicians, and the artists too, have clear vision to 



150 The Reugious Instinct of Man. 

apprehend God. They are not infidel or material- 
istic. They know that the realities and the true 
ideals of existence are spiritual. These kindred 
souls, the composers, artists, and poets, are true to 
what is highest and best in the world, and to what 
is best and highest in humanity. 

Perhaps the noblest mission given to poetry is 
the solution of the mystery of life and death, the 
song of immortality. Poetry, not science, not phi- 
losophy, lifts the mask of seeming, and shows man 
the sweet and radiant face of the divine verities, 
penetrates the mists and shadows to find the ever- 
lasting sunshinings, God's eternal high noon. 

Not only do the poets believe in immortality, 
but it is their holy mission to sing it into the world's 
hope and faith ; to chant it ever in the cathedral of 
the world's great heart; to set the air of all God's 
universe vibrating with its healing and inspiring 
harmony. Shelley himself tells us that "Poets are 
mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts 
upon the present." In their souls we see the reflec- 
tions of eternity, in their song the shadowed proph- 
ecy of the future life. Every great, full-throated 
singer, like Keats, has "immortal longings" in him, 
aspirations which only an eternity can ever satisfy. 
He sees more in man than science beholds in his 



The Poets on Immortality. 151 

mere animalism ; he sees that man is more than the 
bubble on the ocean of circumstance ; he sees more 
in him than statecraft sees, only a cog in the wheel 
of society, a stone or brick in the wall of State. He 
sees in man a heavenly element, a divine likeness, 
an immortal possibility of spiritual and intellectual 
being. His song is awakened by man's greatness, 
by the complexity and mystery of his nature, by the 
wealth of his faculties, by the hopes that lift his 
soul's face skyward and Godward, by the faith that 
reaches through clouds and darkness into the "ex- 
cellent glory/' and grasps the very throne of eternity. 

These great thoughts of man, the true and lofty 
appreciation and estimate of man's noble origin and 
high destiny, give wing to the poet's imagination, a 
mighty rhythm to his speech, a heaven-wide sweep 
and triumph to his song. It is this that inspired the 
psalmist to say of death, "It is as a sleep ;" it is this 
that gives Shelley his thought: 

" How wonderful is death, 
Death and his brother sleep !" 

It is this that moves Bryant to sing : 

" Sustained and soothed 
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave 
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch, 
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams!" 



152 The Rkugious Instinct of Man. 

It is this that enables Tennyson to look upon the 
face of the departed and say : 

" God's finger touched him, and he slept." 

Oliver Wendell Holmes felt the spell of this be- 
lief in man's high destiny when he expressed his 
delight in the lines of Isaac Watts: 

" Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood 
Stand dressed in living green." 

Browning believes that all reality is eternal, that 
man and his God live forever ; and they live forever 
because they are realities, while all else is unreality, 
and must vanish. The circumstances which make 
up the daily life and by which God fashions us to His 
will and plan are only temporary : 

"All that is at all 

Lasts ever, past recall ; 
Karth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure ; 

What entered into thee, 

That was, is, and shall be ; 
Time's wheel runs back or stops : potter and clay endure.' 

David does not confound the body and the spirit. 
He sees the sublime completeness of man, — this dual 
entity, this garment or temple which we call the 
flesh, and this being, this immaterial, indivisible, 
indestructible Godlike element which we call the 
spirit. To his thought, death is but an escape from 



The: Poets on Immortality. 153 

the shackle, from the net, from the prison-house. 
"It is soon cut off, and we fly away." This was also 
Solomon's idea of man in the presence of death : 
"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was : 
and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." 
This look into the larger life, this power to pene- 
trate the cloud and mystery, and find light beyond, 
made Browning an optimist, gave him a sweet and 
abiding satisfaction with life. He flings his splendid 
song out on the air, a challenge to all doubt, pessim- 
ism, and unbelief, an answer to the cowardly ques- 
tion, "Is life worth the living?" He sings his ex- 
perience, his faith, and hope, to be an inspiration to 
the believer, a rebuke to the croaker and the doubter : 

" Have you found your life distasteful ? 

My life did and does smack sweet. 
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful ? 

Mine I saved and hold complete. 
Do your joys with age diminish ? 

When mine fail me I '11 complain. 
Must in death your daylight finish ? 

My sun sets to rise again." 

This great hope that the sun will rise again 
turns earth and life into beauty and joy, and he 
sings : 

" I find earth not gray, but rosy ; 
Heaven not grim, but fair of hue. 
Do I stoop ? I pluck a posy. 

Do I stand and stare ? All 's blue !" 



154 The: Religious Instinct of Man. 

How that beautiful soul with whom Browning 
walked the pleasant paths of life and song caught 
with him the high, great meaning of existence ! No 
loftier strain did he send forth than that which 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning gave to the world's ear 
and heart: 

" Hearken ! Hearken ! 
God speaketh in thy soul, 
Saying, O thou that movest 
With feeble steps across this earth of mine 
To break beside the fount thy golden bowl, 
And spill its purple wine, 
Look up to heaven and see how like a scroll 
My right hand hath thy immortality 
In an eternal grasping." 

It was this great woman's soul, this sister mind 
of Shakespeare, whose fine and sensitive ear caught 

" The murmur of the outer infinite." 

Other worlds, a larger life beyond, grand futures 
opening into grander futures still, the poets see and 
hear and feel. Victor Hugo gave expression to the 
feeling that animates the poet's breast : "The nearer 
I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me 
the immortal symphonies which invite me." 

Heine, even with his modernized Judaism, his 
almost-skepticism, showed his heart-thought to the 



The; Poets on Immortality. 



155 



world when he calmly and sincerely said: "I see 
clearly the wonder of the past. A veil is spread 
over the future; but it is a rose-colored one, and 
through it gleam golden columns and glittering 
gems, and sweet strains are heard." Ah ! the poets 
have had their Patmos dreams, and with the vision- 
gifted John have stood on the great and high moun- 
tain, and seen the Holy City that lieth four-square, 
which the angel measured with the golden reed. No 
such epoch-making poem as "In Memoriam" could 
have sprung golden-winged from the soul of a poet, 
like an angel from its sapphire throne, but for this 
value placed on the soul of man and this faith in 
his eternal life and heavenly destiny. That poem, 
doubtless, saved many an intellectual youth of Eng- 
land and America from infidelity and fatalism, and 
taught him the sweet reasonableness of the Christian 
faith. 

All the great thoughts that ever stirred the heart 
of Tennyson on this sublime theme of the future life 
seem condensed into the song which came one white 
morning to be his own experience : 

" Sunset and evening star, 
And one clear call for mc ! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar 
When I put out to sea. 



156 The Religious Instinct of Man. 



But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 

Too full for sound and foam, 
When that which drew from out the boundless deep 

Turns again home. 

Twilight and evening bell, 

And after that the dark ! 
And may there be no sadness of farewell 

When I embark ; 

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place 

The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 

When I have crost the bar." 

Queen Victoria, one day in 1883, wrote in her 
private journal these words: "Saw the great Alfred 
T. in dearest Albert's room for nearly an hour. He 
talked of the many friends he had lost, and what it 
would be if he did not feel and know that there was 
another world where there would be no partings ; 
and then he spoke with horror of the unbelievers 
and philosophers who would make you believe there 
was no other world, no immortality, who tried to 
explain all away in a miserable manner. We agreed 
that, were such a thing possible, God, who is love, 
would be far more cruel than any human being." 
Ah! Tennyson, thou reasonest well. But is not 
Milton's mighty verse burdened with the holy 
thought? Do not Coleridge and Byron, Words- 



The. Poets on Immortality. 



i57 



worth and Shelley, Longfellow and Whittier, with 
these, all sing forth 

" This pleasing hope, this fond desire, 
This longing after immortality ?" 

Do they not all, in numbers their own, strike from 
the harp of the eternal harmonies this triumphant 
strain: "Thou wilt guide me with thy counsel and 
afterward receive me to glory." 

The poets are true to Christ, true to nature, true 
to humanity. Let us get to thinking with them; 
with them, in holy thought and hope, mount up on 
wings as eagles. Let us look through the clouds 
which they have pierced with their song, and bathe 
our hearts and brains in the light of other worlds, 
and know the inspiration to noble living which comes 
from the belief that the Christ is risen, and, in His 
resurrection, pledges the dying world that "this 
mortal must put on immortality." 



r ED o iyuH- 



The religious instinct of man 
Bristol, Frank Milton, 1851-1932 
8199547 

The Library of Congress 

[28] religiousinstincOObris 

00283101733 
Feb 14, 2014 



